Facebook has reached a “settlement” with the US Department of Justice after it was established that they had deliberately discouraged Americans from applying for a special pool of jobs that they had illegitimately reserved for H1B visa holders, deliberate misuse, as:

“The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States” (US Department of Labor)

While some who are in favor of increasing immigration quotas might argue that this just represents just a small case of exploitation of a flawed immigration system, what it instead represents is corporate revisionism of the law to suit their own interests. If the American people and state want increased immigration, the code must be revised, not arbitrarily violated when it suits the interests. This means that the US can specify which immigrants it prefers, e.g. scientists and doctors, rather than the second cousins of existing migrants. It can also determine or whether it prefers a more diverse pool of migrants than simply favoring those from states who happen to neighbor the US.

Instead, such perversions allow Mark Zuckerberg and a handful of San Francisco engineers and other Silicon Valley elites to effectively illegally print Green Cards for workers they can pay below market rates, simply because they can afford the paltry fines.

“Facebook will pay a $4.75 million civil penalty under the terms of the settlement… although the fine is vanishingly small for a company worth nearly $1 trillion” (Reuters)

This represents and appallingly low sum for the company, especially considering that their crimes applied to more than 2,600 jobs with an average salary of USD $156,000 per year, for a loss to the US workers of more than 400 million dollars, an astonishing sum.

It is representative of large-scale corporate graft, collusion between firms and regulators, and weak laws and penalties on large firms that represent a tiny slap on the risk but largely allow such behavior to continue unabated.

Such paltry fines, and large tolerance by both the American people and the State of these massive conspiracies to violate immigration law not only devalue US citizenship, they deprive both legitimate migrants and refugees from across the world from those opportunities by stealing finite space, resources, and political power from the weak.

 

Staff writer: Ari B

Sources:

https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2021/Facebook-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2020-Results/default.aspx

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/19/facebook-settles-claims-it-discriminated-against-us-workers-for-jobs.html

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/10/19/facebook-settles-us-claims-it-favoured-foreign-workers

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-19/facebook-settles-u-s-claims-it-reserved-jobs-for-foreigners?srnd=technology-vp