A lawsuit was recently filed by the Department of Justice in a discrimination lawsuit accusing the tech giant Facebook of reserving 2,600 high-paying positions in their company for H-1B temporary work visa holders, otherwise known as a green card.
Facebook had reserved thousands of jobs through a federal immigration process called PERM. The positions in question offer an average salary of $156,000. The company did not advertise these open positions on their site but instead held them specifically for the people they sponsored in their employment-based green card program. The social media platform refused to consider U.S workers for the roles and is being sued by the government, as well as the Trump Administration, for abusing its position in more ways than one.
“Our message to workers is clear: if companies deny employment opportunities by illegally preferring temporary visa holders, the Department of Justice will hold them accountable. Our message to all employers – including those in the technology sector – is clear: you cannot illegally prefer to recruit, consider, or hire temporary visa holders over U.S. workers,” said Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband in a press release.
Federal law states that companies must show there are no qualified U.S workers for a specific position before it offers the job to a foreign worker on a temporary visa, especially in regards to those on a green card program. This is the DOJ’s second time targeting Facebook’s practices in terms of censoring content, denying employment opportunities, stifling competition, and putting user data at risk.
The DOJ also filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google for abusing their practices in forcing Google products on people. The company has used competitive marketing tactics to box out potential competitors and make deals with phone manufacturers to set their search engine as the default on pre-loading devices with Google apps. This includes being set as the default search engines on iPhones too.
The lawsuit seeks civil penalties to pay back the U.S workers who had been denied the jobs that went to foreign workers. President Trump has proposed H-1B work visa restrictions in the past.
Large companies such as Facebook and Google have decided to recruit, consider, or hire temporary visa holders at the expense of U.S workers in the past and are getting in some hot water now. They have blocked and held positions solely because of immigration status, and if that’s true, the company might have been breaking a few immigration laws as well.
Big tech companies think they can hold back thousands of American jobs in order to run some cheap labor programs that exploit foreign immigrants. Their liberal platforms are about to get slammed with a lot more than a few censoring lawsuits.
