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Comment by justrealist | Hacker News Reader

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.

Just to add some context here.

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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.

I was responding to someone who was discussing the H-1B process, which matches what I said, not the PERM process, which matches what you said.

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.

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.

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.

Yep. And in many cities there is only one viable newspaper, so they run absolutely wild with the monopoly status.

Well, stupid laws will get stupid compliance.

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).

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