Facebook has been sued by the U.S. Department of justice. DoJ claims is that, the social media monolith refused to consider and hire the U.S. employees who are eligible for the jobs and going for the temporary visa holders instead.
From 2018 to 2019 Facebook has advertised and took on board 2600 immigrant employees on H-1B high-skill visas paying them an average salary of $156,000. H-1B high-skill visas are provided by the American companies to the foreign employees, allowing them to arrive in U.S. and work under them. The companies are responsible for the visa fees and carrying out required paperwork in these cases.
Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband of the Civil Rights Division issued a statement regarding this and, he said that no employer in U.S. should prefer to consider, hire and recruit anyone who is a temporary visa holder, over the U.S. originals. This law applies to the technology sector as well. The Justice Dept. was investigating the matter for 2 years and has come up with this lawsuit against Facebook.
Facebook has been alleged of intentionally preventing U.S. citizen from applying for more than 1000 jobs by advertised those positions as “reserved for temporary visa holders”.
A Facebook spokesperson shared their side of the story by providing a statement to NPR. According to him, the Department of Justice has their full cooperation is reviewing this matter and the Facebook disputes the charges against them. When further questioned, he refused to answer citing the pending “litigation”.
The lawsuit questions Facebook’s initiative of using a process where the applicants had to apply via mail, instead of posting the job opportunity under careers in their website. According to JoD this process results very few applicants from US for the vacancies within the social media giant.
According to PETA (Permanent Labor Certification Process) a US company could sponsor and hire a temporary visa holder for a job, only after providing valid reasons for not granting the position to a U.S. employee. The labor department is responsible for giving away the required permissions or denying them after taking the company’s concerns into consideration.
Justice Department concludes their lawsuit adding that Facebook has gone against the Immigration and Nationality Act by favoring temporary visa holders over the US citizens in their recruitment process. The lawsuit comes under the Civil Rights Division’s Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative which saw its lights during the presidency of Donald Trump.
