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Facebook settles federal lawsuit over allegations it favored foreign applicants

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Re: Facebook settles federal lawsuit over allegations it favored foreign applicants

#41

Post by 1cvmask »

From the article:

The government said Facebook intentionally created a hiring system in which it denied qualified U.S. workers a fair opportunity to learn about and apply for jobs that it instead sought to channel to temporary visa holders.

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At the scale Facebook operates at and the number of employees they hire it makes a huge material advantage for them to hire cheaper foreigners for the same task. It is rational behavior. Foreigners are always cheaper for the same task at hand.

The fine they paid is a fraction of their cost savings over the years. Many companies in Silicon Valley deliberately target cheaper foreigners than Americans.

It is pure economics and FB has that built into their hiring model at scale.

The only way to eliminate foreigners undercutting American salaries is to eliminate the foreign labor supply competition.

That of course will not happen as all the big corporations promote all the alphabet soup of visas ranging from F1 to H1 to others.

STEM jobs are the ones foreigners can compete in and depress the salaries of Americans in SV. The jobs that are not at as much risk are the ones that require command of the culture and language and the lay of the land like enterprise sales and marketing functions.

Re: Facebook settles federal lawsuit over allegations it favored foreign applicants

#42

Post by short12 »

jimbob45 wrote: post #40
SteveGerencser wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. If the NCAA catches you buying dinner for a college athlete you can lose a number of scholarships for several years. Why wouldn't these violation of H1Bs come along with a fine and a loss of H1B access for x number of years? That would go a long way toward solving the problem.

Say what you will about the NCAA but they do a good job ensuring a level playing field for all college athletes (despite being Nazis while doing it). It's no fun hearing about poor athletes struggling to eat at college but, at the very least, the Manziels and the Gurleys of the US are held to an identical standard and that counts for something.

The scandals say otherwise. They are absolutely terrible at it.

The only efficiency they excel at is screwing over the players

Re: Facebook settles federal lawsuit over allegations it favored foreign applicants

#43

Post by schnable »

pc86 wrote: post #16
schnable wrote: post #5

I am supportive of visas for highly skilled workers and immigration in general. However I see many H1-Bs being hired that are frankly overqualified for the work they are end up doing (especially stuff like exploratory QA or entry level operations tasks). I'm not sure we need to import people to do this work. I think the tech industry in the US should be looking at American non-college graduates to do this kind of wor…

I'm not sure it's a good idea to take someone's family history into account when determining whether or not they're qualified to do a certain job. Why should the fact that someone's grandfather went to college hurt them in getting one of these jobs for "people from families without a history of college degrees"? Even if you think this is good for purposes of equity or whatever, how far back do you go? My maternal gra…

I wasn't proposing making it a standard for qualification. More like changing job requirements to be attainable to a broader swath of workers and recruiting in areas that we wouldn't normally, like inner city high school grads.

Re: Facebook settles federal lawsuit over allegations it favored foreign applicants

#44

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

jaywalk wrote: post #3

Up to $14.25 million in fines and restitution for defrauding the H-1B program and screwing over US citizens. Facebook won't even blink an eye at that amount. How about barring them from the H-1B program for 5 years? I think that would be a great start.

No, this is not about H-1B visas. If you read the article carefully you'll see this is about employment-based immigrant visas - i.e. green cards.

Re: Facebook settles federal lawsuit over allegations it favored foreign applicants

#45

Post by mataug »

1cvmask wrote: post #41

From the article: The government said Facebook intentionally created a hiring system in which it denied qualified U.S. workers a fair opportunity to learn about and apply for jobs that it instead sought to channel to temporary visa holders. - At the scale Facebook operates at and the number of employees they hire it makes a huge material advantage for them to hire cheaper foreigners for the same task. It is rational…

> The only way to eliminate foreigners undercutting American salaries is to eliminate the foreign labor supply competition.

The problem isn't foreign labor supply, its that the foreign nationals are forced to stick around at bad employers due to the way US immigration is tied to employment instead of credentials and skills.

Comparing US and Canada, A foreign national in Canada who graduates from a STEM degree, and obtains a job, gets to apply for Permanent residency which is not tied to an employer.

On the otherhand in the US the visa (H1B, L1, O1) are all tied to the employer, which means leaving a bad job is difficult to impossible without jeopardizing their legal status in the country.

So FB has all incentives for hiring foreign nationals who have no choice but to stick around at a company that treats them poorly / underpays them.

TL;DR the problem isn't the foreign national or the visas, its that the US immigration system ties visas to a single employer.

Re: Facebook settles federal lawsuit over allegations it favored foreign applicants

#47

Post by cplanas »

BeetleB wrote: post #39
aaomidi wrote: post #24

H1B program needs a 2-3 year pathway to permanent residency. Your continued life in a country shouldn't depend on a private company.

Disregarding slowdowns due to both Trump's slashing of funding and COVID, for the majority of H-1B holders, it is a 2-3 year pathway. People think otherwise because they have a special (very lengthy) backlog for Indians, and to some extent Chinese. Until about 2018, if you were from another country, 3 years was longer than the average to convert H-1B to a Green Card. Lots of people would get it in less than 2 years.

If I remember correctly, the majority of H-1B holders (around 2 thirds) are Indians. Adding Chinese, it gets up to 80%.

PD: I just checked the numbers. I found this: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/data/h-1b.... Indians and Chinese make up to 90% of H-1B petitioners.

Re: Facebook settles federal lawsuit over allegations it favored foreign applicants

#48

Post by toast0 »

BeetleB wrote: post #39
aaomidi wrote: post #24

H1B program needs a 2-3 year pathway to permanent residency. Your continued life in a country shouldn't depend on a private company.

Disregarding slowdowns due to both Trump's slashing of funding and COVID, for the majority of H-1B holders, it is a 2-3 year pathway. People think otherwise because they have a special (very lengthy) backlog for Indians, and to some extent Chinese. Until about 2018, if you were from another country, 3 years was longer than the average to convert H-1B to a Green Card. Lots of people would get it in less than 2 years.

Are you sure the majority of H-1B holders aren't in that lengthy backlog? If this random page [1] is close to correct, people from India were granted half the H-1Bs, and China another nearly 10%, so it already started witrh a majority being backlogged from issuance, then as others clear the backlog in say 3 years and these take much longer, the holder demographic becomes even more of a majority of people waiting for the giant backlog.

I'm still not really sure why there's such a strict limit on green cards per country of origin, when countries have such a wide variety of population or even area. What if India decided they wanted to make things easier for expatriates as well as increase their influence wherever number of countries count and break into the 28 states and 8 union territories.

Suddenly, they could get a 35 more votes at the UN and a ton more green cards. They could all be individual countries, under the banner of the Indian Union which sets fiscal policy and manages the currency and provide for common defense. There's plenty of space in the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 namespace for 36 new entities, and there's lots of good reasons to do it!

[1] https://www.h1b.io/blog/gets-visas-many-countries/

Re: Facebook settles federal lawsuit over allegations it favored foreign applicants

#50

Post by stronglikedan »

schnable wrote: post #5

I am supportive of visas for highly skilled workers and immigration in general. However I see many H1-Bs being hired that are frankly overqualified for the work they are end up doing (especially stuff like exploratory QA or entry level operations tasks). I'm not sure we need to import people to do this work. I think the tech industry in the US should be looking at American non-college graduates to do this kind of wor…

> especially people from families without a history of college degrees.

No adult should ever be judged by the "sins of their fathers" in any capacity. Family history should only be a consideration when it's medical history.

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