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.
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.
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.
So basically the only way to find any real job posting is to spam-apply to everything. Is there a service for that?
But the fact is, that no one is happy with the immigration process. It's utterly inhumane and expensive.
And to add to that, you don’t know how long it’s going to take. It’s all rate limited in a very opaque fashion, instead of just having a simple to understand but high bar.
In either case, the US as a whole benefits so overwhelmingly from these types of immigrants. It’s really the best and brightest. They just come pre-trained and start paying high taxes immediately.
The article doesn't come right out and say it, but the case seems to have turned on PERM jobs being only available when there isn't a citizen/refugee/permanent-resident available to fill the position and that applying in paper was an unreasonable hurdle to these classes and that the positions should be advertised as widely as other jobs to ensure they aren't missing potential protected class workers who might like to apply.
Theoretically if they find a qualified candidate they have to fire the worker who asked for PERM, and hire the candidate. Since PERM applications are seen as a perk for good employees, and having to fire the employee who asked for PERM if the process finds someone, companies hide the job applications, and find any reason to reject any applicant.
The whole process is ridiculous.
Even though FB/Meta is hiring again and you apply with a referral link, even as US citizen you still get no responses.
No email, no phone call, totally ghosted.
Almost seems like their job board is to appease DOJ rules but they hire on other criteria.
> the company acknowledged in a statement that it had "unintentionally not been following the DOJ standard"
I'd love to know what sequence of events led to this very archaic but unintentional violation! Should be a fun read!
Because if we didn't, we'd have random people just crossing the border at will and living in the country with no repercussions whatsoever.
Oh wait, huh. So, why do we make skilled people prove with mountains of paperwork and credentials that they should be allowed to enter the country?
You get a work visa. There are typically 4 options. There are 4 major options (there are others that are less common):
1. H1B: requires a bachelor's degree or equivalent experience. There is an annual quota. There are now more applicants than visas so there is a lottery. If you don't get picked, try again next year. H1B is issued for 3 years and can be renewed for another 3. Beyond that, you have to leave or file a PERM application and you can stay while it's pending. H1B is transferable with minimal effort to a new employer;
2. TN visa: available to Canadians. It's a 3 year nonimmigrant intent visa that requires. It can technically be renewed repeatedly but CBP is free to decide you're really living here and just deny your visa. The conservative approach is that TN holders wishing to immigrate will transfer to an H1B when possible. H1Bs can have weird conditions like when and how often you can re-enter the country. Some countries don't allow re-entry beyond the first year so leaving means going to a consulate and applying for a new visa;
3. E3 visa: much like a TN but available to Australians. It's 2 years, nonimmigrant intent and not transferable. There's a quota but it's never been hit. Many wishing to get a green card will also try to get an H1B at some point;
4. L1 visa: large companies use this for transfers. Work in Canada or London for a year and then get transferred.
This brings us to PERM. It's basically a 2 step process:
1. File a PERM. This involves many steps like getting a labor certification. This takes 6-24+ months. USCIS may randomly audit you, which can add 1-2 years. They may have a reason too but but they also randomly audit a large number of applications, allegedly to stop the system being gamed. The reality is that it's arbitrary and capricious. Things may just randomly take 2 years longer for no reason at all. Once your number comes up (more on this below), you go to the next step;
2. File an adjustment of status ("AoS"). There are 2 forms that can be filed concurrently (I-141 and I-485 IIRC). This should only take 6-12 months. It depends on your service center though. If there's something weird about your application it may take longer with multiple rounds of RFE ("Requests for Evidence") that each take months to be examined.
PERMs have a total quota and a per-country quota (of 7% of the total). And by "country" I mean "country of birth". Your passport doesn't matter at all. If you're born to Norwegian parents in Mumbai, you'll be in the India queue and you don't want to be there. Expect to wait 10-30 years because there is a backlog in the millions.
Occasionally there's some talk of Congress reforming this but nothing much has changed in a long time.
So where's the abuse? It takes 2 forms:
1. The Department of Labor is meant to ensure you're not underpaid (ie exploited). But they look at average pay for software engineers in a geographic area. For a Big Tech company, this could be substantially higher. But they don't have to pay you that higher amount technically because you're beholden to the company. If you leave you need to file a new PERM (but you keep your priority date). Still, this might add a year or two; and
2. Oncd you have your green card you don't need work authorization anymore so you can freely take a new job. So if you're from India you're effectively an indentured servant for decades because of the backlog.
So H1Bs have no per-country quota but green cards do. We issue way more H1Bs to Indian-born workers than we issue green cards to so the queue is only getting longer. Bear in mind tooo that if you're a worker with a spouse and two children you'll need 4 from the quota not 1.
So these bodyshop companies that employ a lot of Indian nationals flood the H1B pipeline. It's why there's a lottery. The companies don't care who does and doesn't get a visa. These are relatively low paying jobs, which in practice have bad conditions. The threat of being fired keepes workers from demanding better pay and conditions let alone leaving.
Was apple engaging in these practices? I have no idea (and certainly no direct knowledge). But that's what PERM abuse looks like.
Honestly, work visas should just automatically convert to a green card after 6 years.
> Honestly, work visas should just automatically convert to a green card after 6 years.
Taking us from an extreme form of indentured servitude to the kind that was commonly practiced in the 18th century. An improvement!
This is a slap on the wrist.
Opposite in the sense of the direction of the discrimination.
1) You can hire temp workers on visas relatively easily and in large numbers. This benefits employers, politicians, economy, etc.
2) These workers need permanent status. US immigration is uniquely regressive in that everything flows through the employer in most cases and visa holders have no agency. So the employer needs to petition for a "permanent" employee.
3) So although these people are already employed, the employer needs to go through a PERM process where they advertise the job and claim to the gov. that they couldn't hire anyone else and this is the most qualified employee for the job.
4) Although it's a farce, DOJ gets mad if there is a perception that the employer tried to make the PERM process more favorable to the employee they already have.
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.
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.
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.
I'm sure that will be devastating for a company with 162 Billion in cash and really make them think twice
