Apple discriminated against US citizens in hiring, DOJ says

Hilariously enough, a real rocket scientist, e.g. a NASA scientist, has an average salary around 100K. SWE salary is heavily inflated and even the flawed process we have now is better than one where you only look at the absolute amount of compensation. Why, most scientist jobs requiring PhD pay less than 200K.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/NASA-Scientist-Salaries-E73...

https://www.salary.com/research/salary/posting/senior-scient...

I no longer know the current prices for EB2 total cost. But years back I know the cost was >10K+ per employee, accounting for multiple filings, expedited filings, lawyer fee, etc. I doubt it would be below 10K now. Even an NIW can cost 15K easily by going to a law firm and personally haggle the price with them. Can you tell me how do you know EB2 cost less than 10K?

An online paper mill graduate would have a very hard time passing EB2 vetting. Where would they get the paper citations, the impact, the achievements required? Unless they have years of experience in which they made clear they are valuable enough to the field. That is why I said experienced masters. And you think USCIS don't look at what institution the applicant comes from?

Say you have an employee that you've hired on an H-1B. They're a high-performer, and you want to retain them. You can only (not really, but mostly) stay beyond six years in the US on an H-1B if you're on a green card trajectory - meaning that your employer has at least got a pending labor certification application for your position.

Getting labor certification involves demonstrating that you've made a good faith effort to hire a US native worker to fill the position. So you have to try to hire into the role; but you really don't want the search to succeed - because you've already got a good employee that's a known quantity.

Getting labor certification is a pre-requisite to getting an I-140, which is a pre-requisite to the employee getting the green card. Failing to achieve labor certification just delays the entire process and means yet more paperwork and time with the immigration attorneys.

Incentive: you already have an employee on a visa working for you. They are a solid proven employee that you already invested money and other resources into (hiring/recruiting costs, onboarding, training, visa paperwork, time of other engineers helping them out during onboarding, etc.). The employee understandably wants to continue working here or, at least, remain in the country. You, as the employer, can either sponsor their green card and go through PERM or risk losing them in the near future (either to a competitor who is willing to sponsor it or due to them leaving the country voluntarily or them getting hit with some visa issues further on). The incentive here is clear.

So you decide to sponsor their green card process (as it makes sense in pretty much every aspect). Part of the application requirements is documentation proving that the employee that you are sponsoring isn’t displacing local workers and is truly high skill (given that H1B visa to green card conversion is intended for high-skill workers). The way that a lot of employers seem to be doing it is posting lowkey ads in newspapers and other places that technically would qualify, but that are unlikely to catch interest of potential candidates and are way more likely to go unnoticed. Then you wait some period of time. I don’t remember how long it is more precisely, but i remember that it is somewhere between 1-6 months. In the end, you got the document required to go forward with the process.

My guess is that for large tech companies like FAANG it wouldn’t work like that, as their job postings are everywhere. But i think the fact that their interviews are notoriously difficult to pass (relative to most jobs outside of tech, where getting an interview itself is usually way more difficult, but once you got it, you are more likely to pass), that might work as a documented proof. Not sure, as I have never observed how those companies handle it, but I have seen some small employers do variations of the dance that I have described in the previous paragraph.

For a non-citizen, becoming a citizen is a long process (Generally more than a few years). To actually stay in the US and move the process along employer sponsorship is key.

This long process incentives non-citizens to do work at below market rates and to put up with less than ideal employment treatment. Which is great for most businesses as they can get a dev for cheap that they can work for long hours and hold their current residency in the US hostage (it's not a simple process to switch employers).

However, the law has on the books for programs like this and H1B that a company has to have first failed to fill their position with a US citizen. Apple is not unique here in fudging the "tried to fill the position" requirement. I suspect there's more than a few big name company's HR departments seeing this news and getting a little worried.

I should note, the law also says PERM employees should be payed market rate... but market rate is a flexible thing and PERM employees are much less likely to complain.

> PERM has charming and quaint requirements like taking out an ad in a Sunday newspaper so that applicants can apply and other nonsense.

Well, that certainly explains why I saw Lucid advertising in a New Orleans free newspaper and applied and got nothing but a rejection.