Appeals court reanimates lawsuit accusing Meta of hiring bias against US citizens Meta is headed for a legal showdown after judges ruled a hiring discrimination case in the US shouldn't have been dismissed and can go to trial. The case [PDF] concerns one Purushothaman Rajaram, who sued the internet titan in May 2022. On the face of it, his complaint is pretty simple. Rajaram claimed that on two separate …
If he got interviews, he wasn't likely discriminated against. Just because an interviewer tells you that you are "perfect" doesn't mean you are getting the job.
It may even be a tactic to lower your inhibitions. I've been conned like that before, being lavishly praised for being over qualified (I did not feel that I was quite qualified, let alone over) and that the job would be mine etc. Then simply never heard from them again, and was "ghosted".
I don't really believe it is the difference in pay, which is insignificant to Meta's bottom line, but rather that they are tethered to Meta by the visa. They can't just go to another company. They either work for Meta or are deported. Zuckerberg likes employees likes to wrap visas around employees' throats and tie them to their desk. The Romans chained slaves to the oars of their ships to enforce a similar loyalty.
Step carefully there. SCOTUS decisions have, of late, reserved some surprises.
As for the complaint, I feel there is some ground in it. A competent US citizen did not get the job some H-1B holder got. Sure, the competence of the H-1B holder is not put into question, but the chance that he also has decades of experience for that specific job offer seems kind of slim to me.
Whatever the outcome, I'm not expecting this affair to do anything to Meta's hiring practices. Not until there's a federal law that states that US companies are required to hire US citizens competent for the job before looking to bring in foreigners.
And that will never happen for many (lobbying) reasons.
Seems hard to prove that a particular case was discrimination. They probably need to get statistics showing that H1B are much more likely to get a job than US citizens, and even then that's not necessarily a smoking gun; considering it's way easier for a US citizen to apply they might have to filter out a lot of low quality US candidates compared to the H1B candidates, who are more likely to know what they want and where they're going.
They SHOULD also be sued or fined (or both) for H1B abuse. The INTENT of H1Bs is to let jobs be filled where there are not US workers to fill the position. For instance, Siemens would build a nuclear power plant, and bring in some German nuclear technicians in on H1B Visas for a couple years to show the US-based techs the ropes. Or, like, if the US picked up a bunch of scientists like they did in WWII they"d probably do H1B paperwork for them in the modern era.
It's NOT so companies can hire lower cost labor when there's highly trained US worlers looking. And there's rules against that, they are just openly ignored and apparently completely unenforced.
The actual H-1b visa has no requirement to look for a qualified local first, even a highly qualified local can simply be bypassed, in favor of an H-1b worker. The U.S. has seen around 350,000 tech layoffs this last year and a half. Yet, the number of h-1b visas requested is at over 400,000.
The massive demand for h-1b visa workers is occuring for a lot of reason, all of which are highly bigoted and discriminatory against better qualified local candidates.
#1 - The U.S. gives companies a 15% discount to hire foreign STEM student (for up to 3 years), that is the start of the pipeline problem. We should extend the 15% discount to all students and the unemployed, as part of an Apprenticeship program. If the local leaves the job early, they pay back the tax discount.
#2 - Hiring managers prefer to have an advantage when hiring a candidate. A great advantage is hey, "I got you into the U.S." if ever I need a favor, I can count on you.
Hiring managers make the decision to hire, the C-suite simply sets overall hiring goals. If the Hiring manager is trying to build a fiefdom of indebted underlings, they simply find ways to exclude all candidates, except those for which they have an advantage. The result is a FALSE claim that they can't find any qualified locals.
At Facebook, this really came to light in DOJ vs Facebook 2023. In that indictment, Facebook's own HR personnel said every tech job openly advertised, they found 30+ highly qualified local candidates, that 29+ more than they can actually hire. The discrimination came in to affect, when Facebook's HR personnel told Federal investigators that the thousands of local engineers they turn away are better qualified than foreign workers undergoing Green Card certification at Facebook, for similar jobs. Facebook's HR was barred from forwarding the resumes of these better qualified locals to the hiring managers involved in Green Card certification, because it would immediately invalidate the Green Card application. Facebook refused the FREE offer of the San Francisco Chronicle to place the Green Card certification job ads on the Chronicle's jobs website, instead they were buried in 2-Sunday print editions of the Chronicle. All local applicants had to send a stamped mailed letter with their resume to a lawyer's office in Palo Alto.
#3 - Companies often have an overseas office, (All the big tech companies do this). They don't look for a local candidate, they instead choose people from overseas that they trained on the cheap and bring them in.
#4 - Most of the demand for H-1b visas comes from Offshore Outsourcing companies.
#5 - Most of the H-1b recipients are trainees, right out of college.
The whole OPT, H-1b, and Green Card system encourages massive discrimination against highly qualified local engineers in the U.S. And it is that discrimination that get translated into a False claim of a tech worker shortage.
After the 2020 indictment, I suspect Facebook's C-suite became aware of the discrimination. Zuckerberg himself said they needed to get rid of middle managers, and they working with lawyers (who literally encourage it, see Perm Fake ads on YouTube) have developed a bigoted view of local U.S. engineers.
Traditionally, whatever the 9th court rules will be overturned.
That being said, there is a simple solution to the whole H1B visa problem. Require conpanies who wish to use one to pay the annual salary a US citizen would be paid for the job as the fee to secure the visa, and require that the fee be paid in advance each year on a nonrefundable/proratable basis. And, require that the H1B employee get paid the full salary regardless of what any recruiters or anyone else is paid; the H1B employee does not pay headhunter fees, the company does. Further, if the employee quits, the employee is deported and immediately eligible to get picked up on a new visa while the company cannot replace the employee until the paid for visa runs out. This makes an H1B visa worker at least twice as expensive as a native citizen worker. A company can still get an H1B if they really can't find anyone to take the job, but it would be cheaper to hire a citizen. And, it gives the company an incentive to not abuse the H1Bs they do get.
Another great solution is to keep H-1b visas limited, but allocate them on the basis of salary offered. Trump administration tried to get this through, but it was delayed in the courts (because of opposition from immigration lawyers), and the Biden administration dropped it. This change would have made the H-1b visa available to all those who think they needed it most. And it would have limited (greatly) the use of the H-1b visa by Offshore Outsourcing companies.
The H-1b visa, OPT, and Green Card systems are tremendous business for immigration lawyers. They represent massive repeat business by those groups.
The backlogs only help them make more money, as each year customers have to check-in and work on their applications and certifications. If the application fails a couple of times, this simply multiplies the business.
What we need to do is to encourage companies to seriously consider the applications of local engineers (Facebook find 30x more highly qualified local engineers than they can actually hire, DOJ vs Facebook 2023, from Facebook's own HR personnel talking to Federal Investigators. Lying to a Federal Investigator carries a possible 10-year prison sentence. Facebook never challenged these statements from their own active duty HR personnel, in court).
Think about it, you are a foreign engineering manager, and a U.S. laywer outlines all the way you can legally disciminate and exclude better qualified local candidates. What kind of a mentality does that encourage? It encourages a bigoted one, one that disdains local engineers and favors fresher (right out of college) engineers from your own country.
We need to stop that and get the law to stop enabling such Junk, corrupt, thinking that is actually to the detriment of U.S. business (AKA the massive overhiring and oversubscription of the H-1b visa program) that has led to massive tech layoffs (while only increasing H-1b visa demand).
The usual suspects -- aerospace, government contractors and so on -- are all hiring like crazy at the moment and they discriminate openly against people on H1B visas -- in fact all foreigners (although in recent years they've opened their doors to permanent residents (Green Card holders) because there just aren't enough citizens to go around.
So why would anyone want to compete with H1B holders in a boiler room? This suit has got to be a shakedown of some sort.
Incidentally, in the Good Old Days non-immigrant work visas like the H1 were not transferable. I suppose the workaround these days is to be employed by a contractor who then sells your services to whoever but its really a scam to get low cost Indian workers into the US. In theory they're supposed to pay the going rate -- that was the purpose of Labor Certification -- but all this seems to have got lost in the wash somehow, its all just cheap, insecure, labor now. (....and if reports are to be believed, caste issues as well)
If companies, be they aerospace or any other tech are unwilling to train local U.S. engineers, then they are not really hurting for workers.
Yet, most of the H-1b workers are freshers right out of college.
Or have already been trained (for about 1/10 the cost to train a local U.S. engineer) by the company sponsoring for them for a visa.
Or they are part of a job Offshoring operation, where better qualified locals train them and the entire back office in another country. Then the local is fired.
The fact that many high security jobs require security clearance and/or citizenship, is not unusual. We can't hire engineers from any country to come and test the flight controls on our military aircraft (for example). You'll find similar restrictions in most other countries. It isn't discrimination, it is just basic counter espionage.
But the key and the positive point, would be to encourage retraining. Sometimes even minor retraining can be a barrier to getting job. Especially when there are hundreds of applicants.
Just go and check LinkedIn. Most programming and software testing jobs have hundreds of applicants. Most job interview (like 99%) are geared toward eliminating candidates. I have encountered such interviews. For example, I could not honestly say I had implemented a CI/CD pipeline in one interview (I had implemented dozens of freestyle CI/CD jobs, but not a pipeline yet). Turns out most of the software I have created, is not with mainstream libraries or testing tools, and they needed a FreeStyle job. Nevertheless, at my current company, I implemented 2 such pipelines after about 2 hours of reading. But at least 2 prior interviews, I was dropped because of a lack of specific experience with pipelines.
So there is a huge glut. Managers are trying to protect their friends either currently on the job with them or friends who have lost their job. NPR reported that 90% of the H-1b job holders who were laid off found jobs within 3 months. And I believe this is attributable to the diaspora favoritism.
You need to read DOJ vs Facebook 2020 (and Apple 2023). In that indictment Facebook's own actively working HR personnel told Federal Investigators that they routinely get hundreds of applicants for every software job Facebook advertises on its jobs website. Of those hundreds, typically 30+ are highly qualified for the job. But there is only one job per ad, so 29 or so are turned away.
Further, Facebook's own HR personnel went on to tell Federal Investigators, that the 29 or so they turn away per job ad (and we are talking about hundreds of job ads), are better qualified than foreign workers undergoing Green Card certification at Facebook for similar jobs. Facebook HR was barred, by company policy, from forwarding the resumes of the local engineers they turn away to the hiring manager(s) involved in Green Card certification. Because that would immediately invalidate the Green Card cerification.
Further, Facebook refused the FREE offer of the San Francisco Chronicle to place the Green Card certification job ads on the San Francisco Chronicle's jobs website. Instead the Green Card job ads were buried in 2-Sunday PRINT editions of the San Francisco Chronicle. IF a local found those job ads, they had to send a stamped letter containing their resume to an immigration lawyer's office in Palo Alto.
Facebook was found to be actively discriminating against better qualified local engineers as a result of the evidence. Facebook never challenged the material statements of their HR personnel in court. Facebook never challenged the evidence from San Francisco Chronicle that they refused to do a real market test. Instead Facebook settled out of court.
There were 2600+ counts of discrimination in the indictment (over just the 1.5 years covered by the investigation).
Facebook managers protected their preferred foreign engineers from better qualified local competition, for at least 1.5 years (but likely for decades before that).
Also, note that after this indictment, Facebook had no problems expanding their engineering workforce during the Pandemic. I suspect that the C-suite became aware that every job ad on their website was in fact finding 30+ highly qualified locals.
So lets be clear, this isn't some shakedown, there is real evidence that middle management has a discriminatory, and undue, preference (by the very Federal definition of job discrimination) for foreign workers. And that they refuse to consider the resumes of better qualified local engineers.
And this discrimination is affecting native citizens, naturalized citizens, and Green Card holders who apply for jobs at Facebook. It can grossly affect minority applicants as well, who have no connection at these companies.
The evidence came directly from Facebook's own HR personnel and the San Francisco Chronicle, talking to Federal Investigators (and you can read the indictment on the USDOJ website for yourself).
You can lie all you want to the press and the public about a mythical engineering shortage, but you can't lie to a Federal Investigator. If you do, your risk up to a 10-year prison sentence. Martha Stewart (a billionaire) went to jail on just such a charge.
This particular case isn't going to go away, unless Facebook settles out of court. In court, the plaintiff will be able to subpoena Emails and documents, and call for testimony from Facebook's own personnel. You can't destroy documents or lie at this point. And often in these kinds of cases, the evidence gets released to the public.
At which point others may be able to bring similar law suits if they were discriminated against.
So its a big case, and Facebook can at best just delay it. And then settle out of court. Probably can be settled for a few million. But taking it to court could cost several hundred million.
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