Reading into the press release, there is a distinction that probably escapes most native citizens here: they are talking about EB2 visa, not H1B. PERM certification is not the same labor certification done in H1B.
PERM is a much more rigorous and demanding process and it costs a lot more money than anything related to H1B. The reason is because it leads to a green card, not just a work permit. Often, it requires an advance degree and higher qualification than H1B too, PhDs or experienced masters. The money is paid upfront and USCIS then look into it and approves PERM on a case by case basis often taking a year or more. Then when the PERM passes, the applicant can finally get on the green card backlog and wait a few more years, or a decade if you were born in the wrong place...
This is to say the quality of applicants here is very high and Apple actually felt it was worth it to invest tens of thousands of dollars on each of them just for a green card gamble, which the employee can get then quit Apple immediately after and nothing can be done to them because they are now a permanent resident. No such thing as wage depression or abuse at this point because they are for all legal purposes, an equal to any American once they have EB2.
If the PERM process at Apple is anything like what I saw at Facebook a couple of years ago, then all these “applicants” are actually people already working at the company on non-immigrant visas whom the company wants to retain.
There is no reason to assume that they’re being paid any less than others at Apple. They’re already in the country and have been doing the work for years. Why not give them a path to a green card? Why make the company jump through hoops like having to advertise a position that’s not actually open?
I’ll admit that I’m biased because I was in this process at one point. But the notion that I was taking the job of a native-born American was ridiculous because I had been doing the job in London before. So if anything, I brought a UK job to USA. And to turn that into a green card, the company would have to advertise the job on their website. It makes no sense.
> If the PERM process at Apple is anything like what I saw at Facebook a couple of years ago, then all these “applicants” are actually people already working at the company on non-immigrant visas whom the company wants to retain.
Indeed. I really doubt Apple prefers foreigners in their hiring (it's a rather significant hassle to bring somebody in). If anything, citizens have some edge.
But once an immigrant has been hired, the PERM process essentially would require trying to hire for that position again, and employers (not just Apple) are anything but motivated to replace an experienced and qualified employee with several years' experience at the company with an untested new hire, so they treat this process as a Kabuki performance.
> There is no reason to assume that they’re being paid any less than others at Apple.
Sure there is. The fact that permanent residency costs money and is often desirable means that there is value in a PERM position over a comparable one with no path to permanent residency. Therefore it is only natural for applicants to require less money to find the compensation desirable.
You are writing like we are talking about rocket scientists.
PERM applies to both EB2 and EB3 (so in real world anyone making from as low as $50k+/year depending on role qualifies) and most bodyshops apply for green card for all employees - it's just part of business cost. For EB2 PhD is not needed - MS from online paper mill is enough. For EB3, any degree works.
It's not tens of thousands in cost - it's below $10k all in. PERM Fees to USCIS are around $1200.
The whole system is abused to the end and need to be completely gutted and redone so high end engineer working for Google making $700k was differentiated from Wipro employee making $80k. Right now they are in the same queue. Prevailing wage is a joke as it does not include stock options and does not reflect real salary levels.
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.
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?
>PERM is a much more rigorous and demanding process
It's not rigorous or demanding; it's a mostly pointless bureaucratic exercise in bogus paperwork where lawyers and the gov. make bank. From the article : It also required all PERM position applicants to mail paper applications, even though the company permitted electronic applications for other positions," the DOJ said.
>Apple actually felt it was worth it
Apple doesn't feel. It's just commonsense and market pressure. The alternative would be indefinite indentured servitude.
Dept. of Labor takes a year to evaluate these PERM applications. PERM has charming and quaint requirements like taking out an ad in a Sunday newspaper so that applicants can apply and other nonsense. All while the employee is already working for the company on a visa. The whole thing is farcical.
> it's a mostly pointless bureaucratic exercise in bogus paperwork where lawyers and the gov. make bank
I love how people always think that The Government™ does things to make money, rather some congressman from the Bible Belt just engaging in straight up xenophobia.
> there is a distinction that probably escapes most native citizens here: they are talking about EB2 visa, not H1B.
> Often, it requires an advance degree and higher qualification than H1B too, PhDs or experienced masters.
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but the PERM process applies when H1B holders seek to gain permanent residency too - at least that's been my experience. It also applies to the L1 etc:
PERM certification is required to get a GC on an H1B (it's not needed to get an H1B, just required when the H1B holder seeks to get permanent residency).
There's another side to this story that the media reporting almost never mentions on this; many in the PERM process have lived in the USA for a long time and established families, children, communities etc. To deny them during PERM literally means in many cases to ship them and their American children "home" to a country they may not have seen for 20 years. In some cases the American kids won't even be able to speak the main language of their parent's birth country.
The solution as always is pretty simple - we need to divorce immigration status from employment - the processes should not be linked. This would at a stroke remove incentives for less scrupulous employers to abuse the system too.
But then you would have issues with how to evaluate the immigrant. You may say degree, work history, other achievements, etc but those are already being used as qualifiers in the current system, in addition to the job requirements. So any attempts at decoupling immigration from employment would be seen as "open border" by many politicians and their bases, i.e. not going to be a reality ever.
If even a law trying to let US-educated PhDs getting an H1B easier (just to work, not GC) get blocked, you know how anti-immigration the current political climate is.
> or a decade if you were born in the wrong place...
That's being generous. I'm pretty sure that for people born in India the backlog is well over 100 years. The reason being that only 7500 green cards per year can be issued to people of any particular nationality. If there are 750k Indians with approved GC applications under employment category, that's a 100 year backlog. I'm sure there's a statistic somewhere, and I remember reading an article a couple of years back that claimed that this particular backlog has surpassed 90 years, so it's not unthinkable that today it's over 100.
EB2 final action date for Indian nationals is currently at 01JAN12. Which means that USCIS is currently processing applications from almost 12 years ago. Which means they have to wait a decade before their application even gets approved.
There are people that will quite literally never see an EB2 or EB3 green card in their lives despite having an approved application. The only viable path to a green card for those is marrying a US citizen, period. (as that category has no cap or quota whatsoever)
EB2 requirements: BS or equivalent + 5 years of progressive experience. Or, alternatively, a very light version of EB-1 "exceptional ability" checklist. The fees are couple grand and the major expense is in interviewing and rejecting enough candidates to justify the need. You seem to be confusing it with EB-1.
While it's true these people already work there etc. etc. EB2, just like EB3, requires the DOL certification that "there are not sufficient U.S. workers able, willing, qualified and available to accept the job opportunity in the area of intended employment". [1]
This sucks for firms like Apple because there are quite enough U.S. workers able, willing, qualified and available to take a whole bunch of jobs that are being held by a BS with 5 years of experience... Imagine you are an officer of the U.S. government and a lawyer from Apple sends you an application for a, for example, front end developer. Will you honestly believe that there are literally no U.S. workers able, willing, qualified and available to take such a job? At Apple no less. It's not "some folks won't take a job at Apple/FB/Google/etc for political reasons, so there!". It's literally a claim that there are no US citizens or LPRs who could do that job. How credible you'd think such a claim is?
There is a reason companies pay for this process: they are allowed to maintain the worker for as long as the process goes. And for many people this can take up to 10 years, depending on nationality. If they have a good employee, it is a no-brainer to pay so they cannot leave the company, under the penalty of having the green card process cancelled or restarted.
The applicant keeps their position in the green card line even if they restart the process with a different company. If it will take 10 years at the current company, it will also take 10 years at the next one if they leave right now.
So it does not help retention in the way you believe.
It is beneficial for retention because companies who don't apply for green cards for employees will lose them to firms that apply.
PERM certification is the closest to corporate brain drain that exists. On top of that, people overlook the O1 visa. Both of these are visas that the regular person just can't compete with. They're for individuals the US wants to drain from another country (and are extraordinarily capable of it) and are given to individuals of high accomplishment.
If you're afraid of foreign competition, you should be worried about H1B and similar visas (visas for foreigners willing to slot into a normal "skilled" position), which this article isn't touching on at all. Those are the visas of your peers that companies are willing to hire extranationally.
Doesn’t that make it worse? That they’ll pursue a far more difficult and costly approach rather than, idk, just try to hire the best candidate for the role?
> No such thing as wage depression or abuse at this point
You're saying that Apple can't find people from less-developed countries with these specific credentials and then offer them a starting salary that's $100k under what they would have needed to offer to someone from California?
> because they are for all legal purposes, an equal to any American once they have EB2.
Equal to an American in legal rights perhaps, but there is no right to competitive pay.
>Equal to an American in legal rights perhaps, but there is no right to competitive pay.
The theoretical factor that's supposed to depress pay for workers on non-immigrant visas is that they don't have easy job mobility - the bar to hire an H-1B is much higher than to hire a US native worker. Once you have an EB-2 (an immigrant visa, that entitles you to a Green Card), that no longer applies - modulo national-security type positions that require citizenship you're just as hirable as a US native.
I think this relates to something called batch PERM where they can apply for employment based (EB) green cards for batches of their existing visa employees in similar roles instead of doing recruitment for every single position.
Meta got in trouble with the DOJ for the same thing. They advertised for positions in newspapers and only accepted paper applications for PERM positions, unlike their other jobs which are advertised online. This is mainly because you don't want anyone actually applying for the PERM roles, since you need to prove no minimally (not most) qualified US citizen or PR could be found.
I think long term this is going to make getting PERM approved more difficult. It already takes 2-3 years now (without any audits) to get an I-140 (green card) application approved, not to mention getting the card can take decades in some cases.
People on H1B work visa can't stay on it for more than 6 years unless they actually get through PERM and get I-140, so I'm expecting this change will have a chilling effect on employers sponsoring work visas and applying for PERM unless it's a very specialized role. Why would you sponsor someone if you know they can't work in the country long term ? Hard times ahead for people on visa.
Legislators love the status quo. Having a rotating roster of complaint foreign workers whose employers control their visa, you get to keep all their FICA taxes, AND you get to kick them out after 6 years.
I suspect that this is more a "certain managers wanted certain types of employees," as opposed to a systemic, companywide decree from Up High (like IBM's ageism).
Apple just makes too damn much money to worry overmuch about salaries. If anything, a lot of managers like H1Bs, because they can drive them like slaves. I've seen exactly that, in front of my own eyes. It's pretty disturbing, if you are a manager like me.
> In one email exchange after a Google recruiter solicited an Apple employee, Schmidt told Jobs that the recruiter would be fired, court documents show. Jobs then forwarded Schmidt’s note to a top Apple human resources executive with a smiley face.
> Apple, Google, Adobe and Intel in 2010 settled a U.S. Department of Justice probe by agreeing not to enter into such no-hire deals in the future. The four companies had since been fighting the civil antitrust class action.
Well, if X is working for a manager M for 3 years at Apple(for that matter, any company), M wants to make sure that wheoever applies to X's role during the PERM process (labor certification to ensure that no US citizens/perm residents are available to fill X's role) gets dinged 100%, no exceptions whatsoever. The way they can ding applicants takes shape in different forms: (a) make the job very very specific, thereby showing that other applicants don't have specific skills (b) make the job very generic, then ask for very very precise skills that X's role needs (c) make the interview really tough (d) add extra rounds of interviews (e) a combination of all of the foregoing.
Or more relevant to this, Apple wanted to retain the employee that had been working for them for 3-5 years instead of replacing them with a completely new hire because of bureaucratic legalese.
The PERM application was almost certainly submitted for an existing employee, who had most likely been employed with Apple for somewhere between 2-4 years. Thanks to bureaucratic nonsense they were then required to open up that position to outsiders instead, and if they found someone else who could be hired fire the person that had been doing the job well enough that Apple was willing to pick up tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to go ahead with their PERM application.
Apple seems to have an unusually long-term orientation with respect to employees and to value tenure and retention in a way that the rest of Silicon Valley does not.
I believe it's somewhat overrated how often people switch companies; a growing company will have a lot of shorter-career employees simply because it just hired them all. Apple has been around a few more decades is all.
Isn't the foreign national's status kind of captured at the discretion of the employer?
It sounds like a larger power asymmetry and as an employer, you want that as large as possible.
I mean it also increases stress on both ends, which affects executive function so the parties become handicapped by the relationship, but that's apparently less valuable than the large power differentials to many.
I wonder if there's quantitative studies of firms performances with respect to this. If the theory is right, it's long term one of the more disadvantageous strategies. (Using Apple as N=1 doesn't cut it as a study here)
> Apple just makes too damn much money to worry overmuch about salaries.
Apple is a publicly traded company whose shareholders would not tolerate overpaying for labor.
Further: Apple was caught colluding with other major tech industry employers with regards to hiring/salary.
So please do go on about how Apple doesn't care about labor costs.
And also, look at the wages and benefits for Apple Store employees which are shit for the level of technical expertise they're expected to have and the products they're selling (there's usually at least some correlation between compensation and the cost of goods being sold - obviously not anything approaching linearity.)
Then look at how Apple store staff are starting to unionize, much to the terror of their Head of Retail, who likely makes half a million dollars a year in cash compensation alone - $250/hour, which is more than ten times the base wage for a retail employee (supposedly now $22/hour.)
Your naivete is pretty stunning. There isn't a single corporate employer on the planet who doesn't do everything they can to minimize labor costs.
> There isn't a single corporate employer on the planet who doesn't do everything they can to minimize labor costs.
If a company did "everything" they could to minimize labor costs they'd just fire everyone. But they don't, because this is a bad way to run a growth company. Focus on improving what you can get from them instead of managing them out.
Similarly, people say companies care about profit over everything, but they obviously don't because, say, scented candle companies sell scented candles and not fentanyl.
I worked at a company owned by some large banks. When the immigration lawyer came for a meetings roughly once per year, the place got super quiet. Everyone I worked with did basic stuff ... docker, Spring Boot, and I didn't understand how such basic positions needed visas in such a large metro like Phoenix. Yet, the pay was comparable ... there must be some angle I don't understand.
That's a factor, but I think the H1-B lock-in is more important. Assuming no mistreatment at all is occurring, an employee who you can be fairly confident won't quit still has extra value to you. The H1-B requiring that the employee either goes back to their original country or lines up another company to take over the visa means that they're much more likely to stick around.
Yeah.... Except that this is not true. There's not enough talent in US, so we have to seek elsewhere.
American graduates have these starry eyes and want to work mostly in two types of companies FAANG or early stage startups... Who's going to go to work at pharma companies, banks, electric companies?
Frankly, it's too powerful. We need much stronger protections for workers if we're going to continue down this route. Deportation threats undermine labor's bargaining power, driving down wages and working conditions.
How can we expect to operate a democracy when workers have this gun to their head?
It doesn’t need to be said. At big tech companies it is implicit. You see coworkers being let go and the difference between easily switching to another job because you are a citizen vs having to wrap everything in US and go back to home country.
This is the thing where when you want to sponsor a specific employee for an H1B you have to post notices pretending to look for American citizens instead.
Every FAANG is guilty of this. Every startup is guilty of this. There is no law less adhered to in the US.
Everyone posts the notice on the office fridge or the receptionist stand or runs some newspaper ad to cover the nominal letter of the law. It's completely pointless.
Those tricks definitely occur, but they are also not required in most cases: the relevant obligations only apply when (1) the employer falls under the regulatory definition of either an H-1B dependent employer or a willful violator , BUT NOT IF (2) the candidate is paid at least $60k per year or has a relevant master’s degree.
In our industry it’s rare for condition 2 to be false, even when condition 1 is true. So usually they can just be brazen about not trying to find American candidates. Regardless, non-discrimination rules still apply.
As the article describes, a competitive job search is always required for PERM certification. The employer needs to fill out a DOL form (https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/oflc/pdfs/9089for...), in which section I(c) requires two print advertisements for the job opportunity, and section N requires certifying that the opportunity was "clearly open" to US workers but no US worker who qualified was found.
Are you telling me all those job opportunities in the back of IEEE Spectrum where they give 1 line job descriptions and tell you to mail your resume to some anonymous post office box aren’t actual job opportunities? I can’t believe it!
In other words, professional societies are complicit in this too.
Newspapers absolutely love the PERM stuff because they charge 5x the price. Larger publications that have self-serve job postings will specifically _not_ allow PERM ads without talking to a sales rep who will give you a substantially higher price than the self-service option.
I wonder if they didn’t do it, ifthe argument would be made that “look, these companies didn’t even advertise in IEEE Spectrum!” so they follow along and advertise there as well.
The idea that asking companies to fire their existing employer just to hire some "citizen" employee is dumb beyong measure. H1B visas should not exist in first place. Just give green card and let the person be citizen.
The problem is compounded by the racial quota for Indians in greencards. Indians are extremely good at hacking systems and longer they stay in that queue, they would totally destroy this sort of idiotic system. (This is a complement to Indians).
I'm sure many US-based tech companies can be blamed for preferring the cheaper option ... I would think our visa process plays no small part here, further the lax compliance on what "special skillset" means in the case of H-* visas.
The system allows it, why not take advantage of such.
Work visas of this type should pretty clearly provide a path to at least permanent residency, otherwise the workers are captive employees, and, in any case, highly educated skilled workers that an employer is arguing they can't replace out of resident populations seem like a population that even people that want restrictions on immigration would consider good candidates for it.
H1B should be an annual auction so that the fair market value is captured by the country as a whole. Existing employers should be required to pay the latest market price to maintain their visas.
That would boost wages for all other workers and discriminatorily raise costs against orgs that do not want to “hire American”.
I would argue path to PR on humanitarian grounds, but not citizen centric ones. It's probably ideal from a citizen's perspective to be like Dubai and attract talent with easy professional temp visas and then shitcan them the second they run out of money or become inconvenient.
Actually, if there are (and there are usually are) citizens with the skillset, the person on the visa should not be hired. And these visas are used by companies to not hire those with the same skills.
The various body shops are one thing, but I've seen multiple large companies where they have incompetent individuals of the same nationality under a manager (maybe second level) as well - whole teams. 75+% on H1b. These are "wage draining" visas, not special skillsets.
If it was actually special skillsets, I agree with you.
I find it interesting that Apple hasn't done what many other large US corporations have done and just open offices in a country like India. Then they essentially get rid of any US based employees. No H1B's needed and you're still paying pennies on the dollar for the work.
Try working with people on a 12 hr time difference. It's very difficult.. I don't believe it truly works. I don't think management at some places know it doesn't work because they aren't involved in the actual work.
I've noticed this at companies I've worked at. Either at the team level, org level, or even the company level. I've observed it from White, Chinese and Indians. I think there's just a human tendency of in group bias.
In my case, I wasn't referring to indians, I meant chinese immigrants. My last few managers have been Indian immigrants and they all had diverse teams. I'm sure it does happen though.
You don't want to be the odd one out on a team since you'll be the first to get laid off. Either find a team with a good mix or stick to your own color.
Apple hasn't laid engineers off since the early 2000s IIRC. It didn't happen in 2021 because they didn't overhire like everyone else did, nor did their execs decide to punish their employees like everyone else did.
As sibling comment explains, this is a natural outcome.
Interviews are a poor proxy for predicting on-the-job performance. The manager is disproportionately affected by poor performance of an employee. So, they try to minimize it. To do that, they try to get signals outside of the traditional interviews. And one such extra signal is reputation. Seeking candidates with high reputation leads to developers with open source contributions getting hired, but also those from the manager’s personal network get hired too.
My company's goal seems to be to hire every Indian south of Hyderabad. I do wonder when Americans are going to wake up and realize these high-paying jobs could be going to them.
Readit News
PERM is a much more rigorous and demanding process and it costs a lot more money than anything related to H1B. The reason is because it leads to a green card, not just a work permit. Often, it requires an advance degree and higher qualification than H1B too, PhDs or experienced masters. The money is paid upfront and USCIS then look into it and approves PERM on a case by case basis often taking a year or more. Then when the PERM passes, the applicant can finally get on the green card backlog and wait a few more years, or a decade if you were born in the wrong place...
This is to say the quality of applicants here is very high and Apple actually felt it was worth it to invest tens of thousands of dollars on each of them just for a green card gamble, which the employee can get then quit Apple immediately after and nothing can be done to them because they are now a permanent resident. No such thing as wage depression or abuse at this point because they are for all legal purposes, an equal to any American once they have EB2.
If the PERM process at Apple is anything like what I saw at Facebook a couple of years ago, then all these “applicants” are actually people already working at the company on non-immigrant visas whom the company wants to retain.
There is no reason to assume that they’re being paid any less than others at Apple. They’re already in the country and have been doing the work for years. Why not give them a path to a green card? Why make the company jump through hoops like having to advertise a position that’s not actually open?
I’ll admit that I’m biased because I was in this process at one point. But the notion that I was taking the job of a native-born American was ridiculous because I had been doing the job in London before. So if anything, I brought a UK job to USA. And to turn that into a green card, the company would have to advertise the job on their website. It makes no sense.
Indeed. I really doubt Apple prefers foreigners in their hiring (it's a rather significant hassle to bring somebody in). If anything, citizens have some edge.
But once an immigrant has been hired, the PERM process essentially would require trying to hire for that position again, and employers (not just Apple) are anything but motivated to replace an experienced and qualified employee with several years' experience at the company with an untested new hire, so they treat this process as a Kabuki performance.
Because it's illegal to (positively) discriminate for these people and shield them from competing with American citizens and GC-holders for jobs.
> Why make the company jump through hoops like having to advertise a position that’s not actually open?
As Apple just found out: creating a fake position to end-run immigration law is illegal.
Sure there is. The fact that permanent residency costs money and is often desirable means that there is value in a PERM position over a comparable one with no path to permanent residency. Therefore it is only natural for applicants to require less money to find the compensation desirable.
This isn’t even wrong.
Obviously you displaced a US citizen unless you’re trying to advance the risible position that no US citizen could do what you do.
PERM applies to both EB2 and EB3 (so in real world anyone making from as low as $50k+/year depending on role qualifies) and most bodyshops apply for green card for all employees - it's just part of business cost. For EB2 PhD is not needed - MS from online paper mill is enough. For EB3, any degree works.
It's not tens of thousands in cost - it's below $10k all in. PERM Fees to USCIS are around $1200.
The whole system is abused to the end and need to be completely gutted and redone so high end engineer working for Google making $700k was differentiated from Wipro employee making $80k. Right now they are in the same queue. Prevailing wage is a joke as it does not include stock options and does not reflect real salary levels.
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?
Nurses make way less than 700k and should probably be the absolute top of the list.
It's not rigorous or demanding; it's a mostly pointless bureaucratic exercise in bogus paperwork where lawyers and the gov. make bank. From the article : It also required all PERM position applicants to mail paper applications, even though the company permitted electronic applications for other positions," the DOJ said.
>Apple actually felt it was worth it
Apple doesn't feel. It's just commonsense and market pressure. The alternative would be indefinite indentured servitude.
Dept. of Labor takes a year to evaluate these PERM applications. PERM has charming and quaint requirements like taking out an ad in a Sunday newspaper so that applicants can apply and other nonsense. All while the employee is already working for the company on a visa. The whole thing is farcical.
Well, that certainly explains why I saw Lucid advertising in a New Orleans free newspaper and applied and got nothing but a rejection.
I love how people always think that The Government™ does things to make money, rather some congressman from the Bible Belt just engaging in straight up xenophobia.
> Often, it requires an advance degree and higher qualification than H1B too, PhDs or experienced masters.
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but the PERM process applies when H1B holders seek to gain permanent residency too - at least that's been my experience. It also applies to the L1 etc:
https://www.lawfirm4immigrants.com/h-1b-green-card-transitio...
PERM certification is required to get a GC on an H1B (it's not needed to get an H1B, just required when the H1B holder seeks to get permanent residency).
There's another side to this story that the media reporting almost never mentions on this; many in the PERM process have lived in the USA for a long time and established families, children, communities etc. To deny them during PERM literally means in many cases to ship them and their American children "home" to a country they may not have seen for 20 years. In some cases the American kids won't even be able to speak the main language of their parent's birth country.
The solution as always is pretty simple - we need to divorce immigration status from employment - the processes should not be linked. This would at a stroke remove incentives for less scrupulous employers to abuse the system too.
If even a law trying to let US-educated PhDs getting an H1B easier (just to work, not GC) get blocked, you know how anti-immigration the current political climate is.
That's being generous. I'm pretty sure that for people born in India the backlog is well over 100 years. The reason being that only 7500 green cards per year can be issued to people of any particular nationality. If there are 750k Indians with approved GC applications under employment category, that's a 100 year backlog. I'm sure there's a statistic somewhere, and I remember reading an article a couple of years back that claimed that this particular backlog has surpassed 90 years, so it's not unthinkable that today it's over 100.
EB2 final action date for Indian nationals is currently at 01JAN12. Which means that USCIS is currently processing applications from almost 12 years ago. Which means they have to wait a decade before their application even gets approved.
There are people that will quite literally never see an EB2 or EB3 green card in their lives despite having an approved application. The only viable path to a green card for those is marrying a US citizen, period. (as that category has no cap or quota whatsoever)
While it's true these people already work there etc. etc. EB2, just like EB3, requires the DOL certification that "there are not sufficient U.S. workers able, willing, qualified and available to accept the job opportunity in the area of intended employment". [1]
This sucks for firms like Apple because there are quite enough U.S. workers able, willing, qualified and available to take a whole bunch of jobs that are being held by a BS with 5 years of experience... Imagine you are an officer of the U.S. government and a lawyer from Apple sends you an application for a, for example, front end developer. Will you honestly believe that there are literally no U.S. workers able, willing, qualified and available to take such a job? At Apple no less. It's not "some folks won't take a job at Apple/FB/Google/etc for political reasons, so there!". It's literally a claim that there are no US citizens or LPRs who could do that job. How credible you'd think such a claim is?
1. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/programs/perm...
Very credible, because people already employed don’t really count. It doesn’t matter at what company.
Imagine someone leaves whatever company they are at to take the role at Apple. Now the company the employee left has an opening that can’t be filled.
And that’s how it works. Otherwise there would be no need for immigration in this sector at all.
So it does not help retention in the way you believe.
It is beneficial for retention because companies who don't apply for green cards for employees will lose them to firms that apply.
I think you mean cheaper employee.
If you're afraid of foreign competition, you should be worried about H1B and similar visas (visas for foreigners willing to slot into a normal "skilled" position), which this article isn't touching on at all. Those are the visas of your peers that companies are willing to hire extranationally.
Wage depression is a function of being willing and able to work in the field, not of residency type.
Residency type can only depress individual wages for the person with the odd residency.
PERM is one stage in the Green Card process. (it goes: PERM -> I140 -> I485. https://maggio-kattar.com/three-stages-employer-sponsored-pe...)
https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-eligibility/gree...
You're saying that Apple can't find people from less-developed countries with these specific credentials and then offer them a starting salary that's $100k under what they would have needed to offer to someone from California?
> because they are for all legal purposes, an equal to any American once they have EB2.
Equal to an American in legal rights perhaps, but there is no right to competitive pay.
The theoretical factor that's supposed to depress pay for workers on non-immigrant visas is that they don't have easy job mobility - the bar to hire an H-1B is much higher than to hire a US native worker. Once you have an EB-2 (an immigrant visa, that entitles you to a Green Card), that no longer applies - modulo national-security type positions that require citizenship you're just as hirable as a US native.
I hope that by this you mean Native Americans. Or are colonizers now considered native citizens?
Meta got in trouble with the DOJ for the same thing. They advertised for positions in newspapers and only accepted paper applications for PERM positions, unlike their other jobs which are advertised online. This is mainly because you don't want anyone actually applying for the PERM roles, since you need to prove no minimally (not most) qualified US citizen or PR could be found.
I think long term this is going to make getting PERM approved more difficult. It already takes 2-3 years now (without any audits) to get an I-140 (green card) application approved, not to mention getting the card can take decades in some cases.
People on H1B work visa can't stay on it for more than 6 years unless they actually get through PERM and get I-140, so I'm expecting this change will have a chilling effect on employers sponsoring work visas and applying for PERM unless it's a very specialized role. Why would you sponsor someone if you know they can't work in the country long term ? Hard times ahead for people on visa.
It's basically Dubai++
Let's stop pretending that immigration law can be changed in the current political climate.
It's a remote, theoretical possibility, rather than a practical one.
Apple just makes too damn much money to worry overmuch about salaries. If anything, a lot of managers like H1Bs, because they can drive them like slaves. I've seen exactly that, in front of my own eyes. It's pretty disturbing, if you are a manager like me.
> In one email exchange after a Google recruiter solicited an Apple employee, Schmidt told Jobs that the recruiter would be fired, court documents show. Jobs then forwarded Schmidt’s note to a top Apple human resources executive with a smiley face.
> Apple, Google, Adobe and Intel in 2010 settled a U.S. Department of Justice probe by agreeing not to enter into such no-hire deals in the future. The four companies had since been fighting the civil antitrust class action.
0. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-google-settlement-i...
The PERM application was almost certainly submitted for an existing employee, who had most likely been employed with Apple for somewhere between 2-4 years. Thanks to bureaucratic nonsense they were then required to open up that position to outsiders instead, and if they found someone else who could be hired fire the person that had been doing the job well enough that Apple was willing to pick up tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to go ahead with their PERM application.
It sounds like a larger power asymmetry and as an employer, you want that as large as possible.
I mean it also increases stress on both ends, which affects executive function so the parties become handicapped by the relationship, but that's apparently less valuable than the large power differentials to many.
I wonder if there's quantitative studies of firms performances with respect to this. If the theory is right, it's long term one of the more disadvantageous strategies. (Using Apple as N=1 doesn't cut it as a study here)
Apple is a publicly traded company whose shareholders would not tolerate overpaying for labor.
Further: Apple was caught colluding with other major tech industry employers with regards to hiring/salary.
So please do go on about how Apple doesn't care about labor costs.
And also, look at the wages and benefits for Apple Store employees which are shit for the level of technical expertise they're expected to have and the products they're selling (there's usually at least some correlation between compensation and the cost of goods being sold - obviously not anything approaching linearity.)
Then look at how Apple store staff are starting to unionize, much to the terror of their Head of Retail, who likely makes half a million dollars a year in cash compensation alone - $250/hour, which is more than ten times the base wage for a retail employee (supposedly now $22/hour.)
Your naivete is pretty stunning. There isn't a single corporate employer on the planet who doesn't do everything they can to minimize labor costs.
If a company did "everything" they could to minimize labor costs they'd just fire everyone. But they don't, because this is a bad way to run a growth company. Focus on improving what you can get from them instead of managing them out.
Similarly, people say companies care about profit over everything, but they obviously don't because, say, scented candle companies sell scented candles and not fentanyl.
Yeah, you know, this is a professional forum. I may not be important to your career, but a hell of a lot of other people that are, hang out, here.
That's one reason I don't write stuff like that.
American graduates have these starry eyes and want to work mostly in two types of companies FAANG or early stage startups... Who's going to go to work at pharma companies, banks, electric companies?
How can we expect to operate a democracy when workers have this gun to their head?
Every FAANG is guilty of this. Every startup is guilty of this. There is no law less adhered to in the US.
Everyone posts the notice on the office fridge or the receptionist stand or runs some newspaper ad to cover the nominal letter of the law. It's completely pointless.
Just to add some context here.
In our industry it’s rare for condition 2 to be false, even when condition 1 is true. So usually they can just be brazen about not trying to find American candidates. Regardless, non-discrimination rules still apply.
In other words, professional societies are complicit in this too.
The idea that asking companies to fire their existing employer just to hire some "citizen" employee is dumb beyong measure. H1B visas should not exist in first place. Just give green card and let the person be citizen.
The problem is compounded by the racial quota for Indians in greencards. Indians are extremely good at hacking systems and longer they stay in that queue, they would totally destroy this sort of idiotic system. (This is a complement to Indians).
The system allows it, why not take advantage of such.
That would boost wages for all other workers and discriminatorily raise costs against orgs that do not want to “hire American”.
The various body shops are one thing, but I've seen multiple large companies where they have incompetent individuals of the same nationality under a manager (maybe second level) as well - whole teams. 75+% on H1b. These are "wage draining" visas, not special skillsets.
If it was actually special skillsets, I agree with you.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Just look at the academic hiring phds for aerospace related department in US and tell me its not filled with hispanics.
When you start pointing fingers at people other than Indian/SEA and Chinese now it gets into the racist territory.
Interviews are a poor proxy for predicting on-the-job performance. The manager is disproportionately affected by poor performance of an employee. So, they try to minimize it. To do that, they try to get signals outside of the traditional interviews. And one such extra signal is reputation. Seeking candidates with high reputation leads to developers with open source contributions getting hired, but also those from the manager’s personal network get hired too.
This effect is not limited to immigrant managers.