Comment by BeetleB
5 hours ago
> The job is supposed to be treated as an open position and the recruitment is supposed to be done in good faith. So, if a qualified, willing, able, and available U.S. worker applies for a PERM job, the employer either must hire this person or terminate the PERM process and wait at least 6 months before restarting it.
The "or" part in the last sentence is worth noting. At the place I've worked, the employer invokes the second clause (i.e. PERM process is canceled/suspended, and they try again 6-12 months later).
The way it worked there was: Employer publishes an open req. We get lots of resumes. Manager calls the few people who may be a match. Then the manager has to justify why the person doesn't have the skills and the process continues.
Sometimes (and this is likely a bit random), the government does an audit, where they get the details of all who applied. Then they call the manager and start grilling him on why a particular candidate was rejected. If the manager can convince them, the PERM process continues. If not, they fail the Department of Labor Certification and the PERM process is canceled.
The person doesn't lose his job. They're just ineligible and need to apply again after a certain window.
I do know folks applying for PERM who were rejected twice because of this. The insane thing was that their roles (EE with specific specialty) were legitimately hard to fill, whereas other people in the team doing trivial scripting easily got through PERM.
The process is messed up in many ways.
Generally lawyers need to be involved to make sure any rejections are compliant. There's a whole cottage industry around this.
Personally, given the state of unemployment in the tech sector right now, I think it should be virtually impossible to fill a PERM right now because pretty much any position could be filled with a US LPR or citizen and the only reason it isn't is because the whole process is deliberately obfuscated or artificial barriers are put up purposefully to disqualify candidates.
I also think that doing layoffs in the US should disqualify you from doing any PERM or sponsoring any visa for 2-3 years.
> I also think that doing layoffs in the US should disqualify you from doing any PERM or sponsoring any visa for 2-3 years.
This is a very SW mindset, and makes no sense in other circumstances.
If my company canceled a large SW project, and laid off a lot of SW folks, why should that prevent them from sponsoring someone to work on nanoelectronics?
Since we are doing wishes and grievances, why have PERM at all?
The specificied purpose of PERM is to to fill a position that otherwiswe can't be filled by a US LPR or citizen..
If you need to hide your job postings on an internal physical caulk board in a basement and post them in only physical copies of The Columbus Dispatch then it should be pretty clear you're not following the spirit of the program. If, even after doing that, you then disqualify candidates for pretty fake reasons and you somehow still have qualified candidates so you pull the position and try again in 6-12 months then you should absolutely fail a USCIS audit and you should lose your privileges for hiring foreign workers and sponsoring people for residency, at least for a time.
Legitimate employers and jobs can't get a visa in the H1B lottery because of widespread visa abuse. People from certain countries (particularly India) have to wait 10-15+ years because of abuse of the system. Fake employers with H1B schemes, bodyshops that really pay below prevailing wage and can keep Indian-born people as effectively indentured servants, spamming the system with H1B applications because they don't really care how many they get.
We're in permanent layoff culture now where pretty much every sufficiently-sized employer will probably fire 5-10% of their staff every year while still hiring people. This is to suppress wages and make people do more work for free. There should be a cost to this.
If you're an immigrant, a completely arbitrary layoff can be devastating. You have a short period to find a new job and if you don't, you have to leave the country. Employers who will do that to immigrants shouldn't be alloweed to hire immigrants.
You can be both pro-immigration and anti-immigration abuse.
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