Comment by pontus

>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

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 immigration_department@tech.corp" 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.

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 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"?

> 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.

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…

> Both ads must run between 30 and 180 days

what can be a reason for an upper limit?

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

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.

Is there no better source (perhaps a link to the Seattle Times Classified) than an image on Twitter from a political account?

If these jobs are fully remote, why are tech companies going through the process of getting visas to import workers? Am I missing something?

Let’s put our pitchforks down and think for a moment.

Do you really think that Netflix has a preference for non-Americans?

On one hand we say they chose Americans to pay less money on the other hand we see this absurd amount of money for a remote job

Why? Because this is not them looking to fill a position but rather trying to get a PERM for an employee that they are already happy with. We don’t even know if it’s H1B or L1

Not saying that the H1B program doesn’t have its problems, but this is not the case of let’s fill this job with non-Americans for less pay

Cheap labor

> The question is what the purpose of visa to residence work programs achieves

It achieved wage suppression and control over workers livelihood.

And it should be illegal, perhaps even criminal the way some companies go about it.

That reminds me of the Richards Tip episode from Nathan for You, in which, in order to fulfill a legal requirement for a name change, they started printing a newspaper called The Diarrhea Times.

It’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.

100% happens. Microsoft is for sure an offender, but the biggest offenders are companies like Infosys, Cognizant, Accenture, and IBM (among others).

There's a whole business model of US-citizen managers, H1B front-line employees, and offshore support staff. They flood the H1B lottery, crowding out (imo) more deserving high-skill folks. Was really insane to see.

IMO, going after sketchy practices like this is a MUCH better approach than reducing the volume of H1B employees.

It's fairly accurate.

It's a controversial site simply because of what it's targeting but "jobs [dot] now" surfaces a lot of these newspaper ads that they catch, and also highlight crazy (in the modern day) stuff like "send your resume via mail to this address to apply" or at times even custom job boards that only have the PERM roles on them when the company has a completely different board for all others.

I used to work for corp Walmart and they’d do H1B postings on a wall which would list salary and stuff. I don’t think they’d post it anywhere else

This happens. It’s the SOP, but it’s because they already have someone doing the job on a work visa and they don’t want to have to fire them and hire/train someone else.

It’s not necessarily a green card problem (ok it is, but…); it’s more of a visa problem.

It's rather insane that you have to state that first - don't you think?

One should not have to disclose one's politics to make such a comment. IMO. That means that we should not think "smells like a Republican, so ignore them!".

These companies are going to bribe the govt for h1b. They thrive on cheap labor provided by h1b and the whole masters to h1b pipeline via opt.

It's literally required by the government's PERM process

Trump gave the Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, the National Medal of Science today

You can't prosecute someone for following the law verbatim.

If Republicans started prosecuting crimes there'd be no republican politicians left.

You did not respond to the point.

> they're applying this argument asymmetrically to their allies vs. foes

If a law is on the books, but it's only applied to a specific set of people in a retaliatory fashion, then it's worse than not being applied at all.

The "replacement of an American" is where the narrative breaks down. Traditionally we haven't had large numbers of unemployed developers. One of the consequences of the the Dot Com bubble bursting is we lost an entire generation of native-born engineers. People weren't going in to CS. At the same time there was an explosion of software positions. This is part of what fed the increasing use of H1B talent. This was also one of the sources of the bootcamp phenomenon. Things are bit more dynamic these days. This is just a nativist, anti-immigrant move.

It's only kind of accurate. It has to be 2 newspapers in the area the person is employed in. Hard to prosecute them for following the rules they are given.

The rule is the job has to be posted with the state workforce agency, 2 Sunday newspapers, and 3 other recruitment methods (mostly at the company’s discretion). PERM is basically a retention tool as h1b is temporary otherwise. Obviously they are going to choose the 3 methods least likely to produce good candidates. As with most immigration issues, it could be trivially fixed by Congress but won't be.

Vance actually admitted the "eating cats and dogs" thing was BS, but said it was okay because it helped "advance the narrative".

That is actually not complying with the law. The law says it has to be in at least two newspapers.

Internal job postings are not unusual.

> but if that was the only posting

"I saw a thing once, and I'm going to wildly guess some incriminating details, and then claim it's proof of some sort."

Even Vance does a better job of manufacturing outrage than that.

Microsoft is banking on the fact that nobody looks for jobs in the paper. The point is to use the lack of response be able to write on paperwork that they've proven that no qualified jobseekers exist in the US. They are aware that advertising in the newspaper is not an effective way to fill a position; the goal is to lie about how much they tried.

It's compliance theater. They can claim they technically complied with the requirement to search locally for applicants first.

Based on its track record, I don't think the administration is "going after" anyone in good faith. This is just a way to compel Microsoft to do something beneficial to the guy in charge.

Or he's trading off of it.

That's more likely to be a terrible hiring manager. I've seen that at smaller companies, too.

If they change the ad between the local newspaper and the foreign search, they would be breaking the law. That's not what is claimed, even by Vance.

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

It's not an administration thing. Vance is positioning himself for a presidential run in 2028.

Literally hours later, the head of the same administration gave the head of Microsoft an award.

Very on-topic, reminds me of some analysis of why Putin and Xi generally tolerate corruption among their subordinates: it allows them to purge anyone they want with plausible deniability, since everyone is on the take.

This is a very well known tactic in H1B factory like Tata and Cognizant, people has been complaining about this for years. Not sure about Microsoft though.

Why aren’t they trying to change the laws of h1b, etc. while they have control of the all branches of the government and instead just target certain companies? Why not just close the loopholes, assuming there is systematic abuse, so no one can abuse the system anymore?

Generally they just focus on cases that are the most profitable and easy to prove.

I've seen job ads for the DC/Langley area smeared over local "classifieds" sites for states in the Midwest. I almost applied once, but realized that'd just encourage the practice, and most of them seemed like they hadn't been updated in months.

Unfortunately due to the corruptness and incompetence, you're almost certainly getting nothing beyond this headline.

Even a stopped clock!

This is why i voted for him and will keep doing so. The left is too weak to push through things like this with their “morally superior” voters. So, your welcome.

No need to wonder, Top offenders like Tata, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant all listed.

Presumably somebody didn't get paid.

Indeed. I had a friend who worked in freight forwarding - Japanese company, him a Japanese citizen, but based in US.

Once he got his green card via lottery, his pay went up and his mandatory overtime went down. His Japanese coworkers without green cards still had to work late.

Trump was defending H-1B a year ago even as his immigration crackdown was shifting into high gear. This is simply a pre-election move that will likely be reversed by the administration or the courts.

> 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.

Source? But also what difference does that make? Just pay American workers more.

Yes and no. Why is the prevailing wage what it is, and how does bringing more supply in affect the prevailing wage? There are secondary effects.

100% as someone who sponsored someone yeah they are and the government kind of wants you too

Speaking from personal experience, this is not true. Myself and every H1B I know was paid significantly below the prevailing wage.

I have worked with a lot of H1B's in tech.

I have not met a single one who was not over qualified for the job they were doing.

I have only met a couple who were (to some extent) getting screwed because of an agency in the middle. However I would not have found the wage unreasonable and the markup was well within the industry standard.

H1B is a path to import talent that mostly wants to stay here... We need to fix the portion of the process where it is onerous to go from H1B to green card and citizenship.

Agreed. As an ex-immigrant to US who's gone through this process, credit where credit is due: Vance exactly described how this process looks like.

US needs a modern, merit-based immigration system. No lotteries of any kind, be it the de-facto lottery for H1B or actual Diversity lottery.

It's not very accurate, they need to be newspapers where the person is employed. It's the government that is behind the times with respect to how people find jobs. And it's not really "fraud," it's simply companies working in their own interest within the existing outdated rules.

Besides newspapers, they have to be posted with the relevant state workforce agency and 3 other methods. It would not be hard to require that one of those needs to be the company career site or wherever the majority of recruiting comes from.