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

It does say in the law [1]: "there are not sufficient workers who are able, willing, qualified (or equally qualified in the case of an alien described in clause (ii)) and available at the time of application for a visa and admission to the United States and at the place where the alien is to perform such skilled or unskilled labor".

The rules of DOL are just guidelines how they are going to determine this but they are not the law. I will argue that if you are planning to publish your job ads in a small town newspaper you do not believe yourself that there are no "able, willing, qualified and available" Americans for your job.

1. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1182

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

What an absurd carve out seemingly designed to facilitate exactly the sort of fraud being alleged. If you want to argue that you couldn't find qualified local workers one of the basic prerequisites ought to be documenting what the prevailing wage is and openly advertising the position at some small percentage _above_ that rate in order to attract local talent. In all cases the accuracy of that value should absolutely be audited by the government before granting the application.

"We couldn't find any qualified local applicants willing to accept substandard pay and we don't feel up to competing properly" is absolutely not the stated purpose of the program yet the rules apparently cater to that. A complete farce on the part of the federal government.

Some of these requirements are so ridiculous that they create the need for everyone to do what Vance is accusing Microsoft of.

Many companies fulfill the intent of the law. They run a real hiring process — where they advertise online and interview people with work authorization/citizens and people who would require sponsorship.

But if someone requiring sponsorship was the best candidate for the job, then they have to run an additional “fake” process that fulfills these requirements, since no one actually hires tech workers from the newspaper.

It also doesn't say that the paper needs to be widely read, just circulated, right? I mean, why pay for a job ad in the SF Chronicle when you can put a cheap ad in the (now defunct?) SF Weekly free paper? When it was still around, SF Weekly would have met the threshold for being widely distributed...

Why pay to reach many thousands of people with a widely read paper when you can pay pennies to reach dozens of people that you don't want to apply to the job anyway?

This is an entire business model.

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

Based on that I would expect that if you advertise in small town newspaper, the job needs to be located in that small town. Want them to work in your big office next to big city, then it must be a newspaper widely distributed in that city not a small town on the opposite side of continent.

Are you trying to justify the exploitation of this loophole?

Nearly all these ads say "Send CVs to [email protected]" they aren't even trying to conceal what they're doing.

Those are some seriously out of touch requirements that could easily be fixed if anyone in power actually wanted to.

Waa! Is that why I'm still unemployed, because I haven't been buying (or reading) newspapers...

I heard that this rule is genuinely keeping the lights on for some local print media publications.

"The newspaper must be widely distributed in the area where the job is located." Which of these mega-crops are located in a small town?

Do people still look for jobs in newspapers? I don't think my city (non-American) even has a local newspaper anyore.

I would hazard a guess that Microsoft follows this process exactly, and this probably won't hold up in court. But it looks like good midterm fodder!

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

Advertising in the Sunday newspaper seems a bit antiquated. I don't think I've looked in a newspaper for a job since the 90s.

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

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

What does 'widely distributed' mean if not "not just in a small town"?

Please use more than one brain cell in order to consider the intent behind those guidelines, and whether what Microsoft (and similar companies) is doing is actually within the bounds of what voters and the representatives who wrote the relevant laws wanted. Do you really think the purpose of making companies advertise the job opening in a newspaper was just to give companies a bunch of busywork? or might there have actually been an intent behind it? Are you capable of ascertaining what that intent is? (note: this question has a right answer that all people arguing in good faith are capable of stating)

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

I think it is implies in: "The newspaper must be widely distributed in the area where the job is located."

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

Ah yes, the newspaper, the bastion of where all millennial and Gen Z software engineers deign to get their news from in 2026…

But why must it be on print? I mean ... does that make objectively sense? I don't even read paper news anymore.

> Both ads must run between 30 and 180 days

what can be a reason for an upper limit?

Sounds like a good time to start responding to newspaper job ads

Yeah, the rules are designed to facilitate fraud. They let you put job ads for web developers in a newspaper instead of, you know, on the Internet.

If the rules weren’t designed from the outset to facilitate fraud, they would have required the company to advertise the position in the same places they advertise their other jobs.

Imagine if they changed the law to reflect what they wanted instead of randomly punishing companies that most likely are doing the same thing everyone else is, but they angered the admin by telling them "no" on some topic.

Newspaper!?

Yes, these are literally the guidelines provided by the DOL. And the government seems to want to punish companies for following the exact published guidelines.

Just vote bank politics. Microsoft is not a cheap sweatshop. If it is a sweatshop and still producing what it produces then that defies logic. We can only expect more of these as mid terms approaches.