alt Hacker NewsIt’s because the companies are following a flawed process, not that they’re committing fraud.
The PERM process is flawed because it puts the onus of proving a need for international labor in the market on the company instead of doing it at a government level. Say in the market, you have 1000 jobs available for a role, but 900 US citizens available for doing the job. If the companies want to fill the 100 positions with non citizens and provide them to a path for permanent residency, they have to prove that no US citizens are available by advertising the position and hiring for it.
In a theoretical state, none of the 900 candidates will apply for that job because they are already employed. In reality candidates move around, so the test they ask companies to conduct is flawed.
I know people get emotional on this matter but they don’t understand the process. IMO all of this can be avoided if the labor market tests are managed centrally like a lot of countries do. You evaluate the shortage, fill those roles and then update the statistics to reflect that the shortage was filled.
Replies
> I know people get emotional on this matter but they don’t understand the process.
This kind of “logic”—the process is broken, therefore it’s okay to cheat—isn’t very popular with Americans.
Nope. Companies are just taking advantage of the system. Just look at who the biggest importers are. Tata Consulting? I mean that's clearly just cheap tech labor. I once was contracting and had to train my replacement from Infosys who was there on an H1b visa.
The companies lobbied for this process. It's flawed by design. If ti worked as you suggest, then companies couldn't exploit their workers.
TLDR;
They were committing fraud fraud fraud
We need clawbacks from the C-suite and disgorgement of illicit profits
This model assumes that the number of positions is fixed at any given time, but that is not true. Instead, it will fluctuate based on what must be paid. So, to extend your example, without H1B or a similiar program or de-facto state that does the same thing, then we'd get roughly the 900 jobs that are willing to pay the most to be filled, while the rest are not worth the cost of employing someone in this hypothetical market. The result, then, is a higher wage for those 900 citizens.
This is not to say that such programs are bad. To consider that, we must ask questions like:
- Is citizens being able to make much more than non-citizens a desirable outcome? (it's electorally incentivized, since citizens can vote in the relevant elections but non-citizens can not but that is not the same as being desirable in a more broad sense) - How big is this effect? - How badly do we (meaning society at large) want these final 100 jobs done? - How will this affect competition with other countries? - What about outsourcing?