Here are the rough requirements for said newspaper ad according to DOL:

• The job must be advertised in the print edition of two different Sunday newspapers.

• The newspaper must be widely distributed in the area where the job is located.

• Both ads must run between 30 and 180 days before you file the PERM application.

• The advertisement must clearly state the name of the employer.

• The ad must outline the job duties, requirements, and the work location.

• Listing the wage is optional, but if included, it cannot be below the official prevailing wage.

• Employers must keep the full-page newspaper tearsheets for 5 years in case of an audit.

It doesn't say anywhere that it cannot be advertised in a small town.

If anyone needs an example of this happening, here is one from yesterday. Netflix is advertising a fully remote $750K software engineering job in the Seattle Times classifieds but the same job isn't listed on their career website: https://x.com/JobsNowPR/status/2107816460634784094

I've seen it done in not even a small-town newspaper. A company I worked for put it into a print newspaper I cannot even find anywhere and I suspect the lawyers who we used to help in the process owned it themselves (but I can't prove this). I am not sure if there is a set definition of what a small-town newspaper is or "widely distributed". Like what if lawyers print it once a month/year and just distribute it around public parks or something? Is that widely distributed?

This isn't even a good basis. The question is what the purpose of visa to residence work programs achieves. No one ever questions the underlying assumptions. Like for example, could filling skilled roles actually cause a self fulfilling prophecy? If Americans assume immigrants will fill a role, they don't acquire the skill which actually creates a dependence on immigration to fill it.

I'm not a Republican, but if this is accurate, it's something that these companies (or individuals in these companies) should be prosecuted for.

The steps described are legally required before you can file a petition to hire a foreign worker.

Vance simply exploited the fact most people don't know that.

Tangential but may be of interest, in Eastern Europe I was informed of a common practice, that an organization will advertise a role in a paper and then reject every applicant for bullshit reasons, because they already decided who they want to hire internally (usually some nepotism) but have to "go through the motions" for legal reasons.

A place I used to work advertised a job by posting the listing in the break room, where only people with badges could get in to see the advert. Maybe there were ads elsewhere, but if that was the only posting, it felt against the spirit of the law.

DOL requires the ad in the newspaper. Vance also said Haitians were eating cats and dogs. Let's not get carried away by things Vance says.

But to be real, does this really matter? Do any software engineers or other positions Microsoft is looking for in these examples look for jobs in the paper these days? Would they get more responses if they advertised in a larger paper?

Another way to look at it is that they are going after particularly notable fraudsters that have very high visibility and perhaps perpetrate it at a higher rate.

I remember years back, I was maybe 5 years into being a sysadmin and saw that Microsoft was hiring, at the time they said that they expected high proficiency in the following.... And listed every piece of software they produced. It was ridiculous then and probably the same thing is the case now.

> they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants

Wait but PERM process is precisely for getting that foreign person outside of the temporary "effective indentured servant" phase. It's to get a green card... Once you have it you can leave the company and work anywhere.

Where it gets maybe abused is only India/China pipelines, where they're stuck in that GC backlog for years. so it makes them in this limbo of renewable H1B until the GC is granted, which might be decades out.

Really a bizarre workaround. It's not even restricted to these massive entities.

I flew into a co-working space for a team onsite this summer. While walking the halls, I saw a job posting printed out and taped onto a glass door facing out from one of the single-occupant offices, surely to claim a similar approach.

https://volokh.com/2013/02/05/perils-of-prosecutorial-discre...

I was reminded of this article

The entire H1B visa system should be scrapped until every American engineer has a well-paying appointment.

And companies need to advertise outstanding positions on their own website to prove they can't find any candidates. Seems to me that would be impossible and you could scrap the entire H1B Circus right away.

And employees with an H1B visa should leave the country after 4 years for at least 3 months to prevent them from applying for citizenship.

Is there any evidence of that claim by Vance? I am not trying to be confrontational but this claim is so outstanding that it pulled my attention. How did his people got it to a level that they prove it is systematically abused. I am not saying it is being abused or not. I am literally curious on how anyone in the face of earth could do that to a point that you can prove it is not an isolated event.

Anyone, best of luck for people.

(Imo, anti immigration is the easiest way to cut ties with other nations if you plan to send your boys in there to get a trauma)

> My understanding is that this is pretty much how everyone does it, no?

This is not alarming to you?!

Law enforcement when a law is widely violated often involves 'making notable examples' of a few cases to scare the rest into compliance, no?

Yeah this system has been very stupid for a very long time.

Newspaper is ONE of the requirements. It needs to be posted across 5 sources. 2 mandatory and 3 of 10 other recruitment options.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-20/part-656/section-656.1...

This is one of those horrible moments that happen once every decade or two for me:

Somebody I believe is spiritually hideous, morally corrupt, and plain old incompetent, saying something I am in atomically perfect alignment with, using almost the exact same words I would.

The right supposedly hates big gov, weaponized gov, regulating gov unless it's related to foreigners

I wonder why Microsoft is singled out. Shouldn't companies like IBM and Cisco are gross offenders?

Those are literally the rules of what you need to do. Well, except the small-town newspaper part. Pick up the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle and you'll see pages of these ads.

This has honestly been one of if not the only thing I have agreed with the Trump administration on. It also seems like something that has had bipartisan support (at least among the general public), but nobody wanted to rock the boat on these companies that provide so much funding in the form of "donations" and lobbying.

Abuse of the H1B system is pretty widespread if you look at the types of roles that these companies submit applications for. I'm convinced that if you aren't looking for someone who is literally a PhD candidate, lead of their field you can probably find someone somewhere who can write a damn REST API.

For nearly every job title that an H1B is brought in on, they are paid more than the prevailing average wage. The idea that they are coming in as underpaid foreign scabs is mostly a myth.

Burying job listings is part of the kabuki theater, but it's being misrepresented here. Usually companies already have a candidate in mind when they do this. It makes no sense to run a complete hiring process in the US, and then turn around and run a second one for international candidates. You may as well do a complete candidate search and then post the canned jobs again if you need to get Visa sponsorship.

Is Microsoft in particular a "foe" or have they done something particularly against the administration?

What's wrong with people who live in small towns?

Some of us know just as well as folks in San Francisco how to instruct claude to write code.

And this announcement changes nothing. Why only mention microsoft when they aren't even the worst of them? Tesla put out a tesla semi factory video a few days ago and most of the people in it were foreigners on visas.

This looks to be a shakedown for cash. Companies are retaining existing h1bs and not hiring new, so this "change" is coming at a meaningless time.

I think people should be asking why JD has eye shadow on as if he just came from a drag party. The guy looks like a clown and is making a meaningless announcement to fake out the maga base for the election. The h1b announcement from last year still hasn't changed anything. The lottery is still maxed out.

Once you have a green card you also are not indentured anymore :)

This would actually probably be acceptable to me if they multilaterally applied it across all tech companies, not just the ones who don't kiss Trump's butt.

Are you surprised by allies vs foes in politics?

It is. Maybe this is just executing one criminal to send a message to all the others. If they can take on MS, they can take on anyone.

Applying that standard uniformly is just good government.

Selectively applying that standard to advance a specific cause is fascist.

Yes, that is an accurate statement by him. As with many things, corruption and fraud in the visa process have grown over time and are mostly unremarked upon.

The article is lying by omission, it's not just Microsoft, which got suspended from PERM, FT has a list of few other companies (it's paywalled by searching for the article title and clicking the result link works [1]). Also, this is not something extraordinary: big companies get suspended from PERM all the time.

1. https://www.ft.com/content/5cfecbba-69ed-42d0-98fd-3ae019144...

Yes, you are of course correct, lots of large businesses do this, and hopefully they extend this scrutiny to all businesses.

I'm not sure what about this made you question your intuition. Is there something about this story that made you think it might only be Microsoft doing this?