Comment by esalman
5 hours ago
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.
>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
>I will argue
You, or the government in this case, should argue that in a court of law. So far, the government has not won any of these cases in a court of law. And I mean over the last 2-3 decades. The number of successful prosecutions will be in single digits. It's a bit like voter fraud when it comes to actual numbers.
Which cases? What prosecutions? Are you seriously saying that there are no qualified, willing and available workers for random PM or front end jobs and only this particular Indian person, who just graduated from an American college a few years ago is the only one who is able to do the job? I'd love to see a single case like this, got any links?
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They have settled at least one case: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
> Specifically, the department’s investigation found that Apple did not advertise positions Apple sought to fill through the PERM program on its external job website, even though its standard practice was to post other job positions on this website. It also required all PERM position applicants to mail paper applications, even though the company permitted electronic applications for other positions.
Of course court itself could have arrived in different result.
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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.
Considering how many of these adds have more than a hundred of local applicants, and still end up hiring people that are not from North America it is quite clear they do not intend to follow the intent of the law.
Let's be honest they want a captive workforce that depends upon them to stay in the USA and build a life.
There has to be a better way to does not make them captive, and allows Americans to be the first ones, and even after that the priority should be people in North America, even International students.
But the fact they keep hiring mostly and overwhelmingly people from the same five countries that are desperate to come to the USA is an indication these companies are profiting formt he desperation of people.
> Considering how many of these adds have more than a hundred of local applicants, and still end up hiring people that are not from North America it is quite clear they do not intend to follow the intent of the law.
You’re assuming without evidence that for any given job, that there will be qualified Americans willing to perform that job who aren’t already happily employed. You haven’t established that.
Hell, ask restaurateurs. They frequently have difficult hiring qualified local labor, too, even though the bar isn’t nearly as high as for a technologist, in major cities.
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> requirements are so ridiculous that they create the need
It's the other way around. The "need" creates the ridiculous requirements. Companies get the laws they want and the laws they want are those that give them an excuse to do what they want to do.
Is that really the intent of the law? From here it looks like the intent is to favor citizens to people who would require sponsorship, but a hiring process that selects the best candidate from a single set of citizen and foreign candidates doesn't do that.
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.
“But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
> This is an entire business model.
was this how those 'free newspapers' back around 2005~2010 worked?
Yeah. The trade rags from companies like Ziff Davis had a section of plain classified ads that were like 2-4 pages of 6 point black and white text.
> 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.
I wonder if wfh creates any loopholes here, and they just select areas where there are no real candidate pools.
I've seen these ads. Not the latest, some things might have changed, but circa 2015-2018, this is how they rolled:
1. You choose newspapers that are least likely to actually reach people looking for tech jobs.
2. You post an small ad specifying the role in the most vague and unappealing terms.
3. There is some weird and inconvenient way to apply (e.g., fax- or snail-mail-only) that goes to /dev/null.
You can argue that it follows the letter of the law, but as a practical matter, the outcome is always that there are no US-based applicants for any H-1B SWE role, so something is wonky, right?
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I'm not sure there is any advantage in publishing this in a remote town rather than NYC and SF.
Any tech savvy person in NYC or SF would not be scouring newspapers for tech jobs and even if they are, they are most likely to be H1B or Greencard themselves.
A small town newspaper may actually make people apply to those roles.
But either way, people who likely to come through these ads can be easily disqualified just by adding a few technology stacks
What's the point of bringing in workers into US just to have them work remotely from home? At that point why not have them work remotely from other side of ocean.
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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.
Yeah, I believe these are the requirements for PERM: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-20/chapter-V/part-656/sub...
They are wildly out of date compared to how jobs are actually filled. Regardless of any other enforcement actions, this needs to be fixed.
I don't think it even needs congressional approval to change these. The DoL could do it.
Just copying the actual newspaper part here:
(B) Advertisements in newspaper or professional journals.
(1) Placing an advertisement on two different Sundays in the newspaper of general circulation in the area of intended employment most appropriate to the occupation and the workers likely to apply for the job opportunity and most likely to bring responses from able, willing, qualified, and available U.S. workers.
(2) If the job opportunity is located in a rural area of intended employment that does not have a newspaper with a Sunday edition, the employer may use the edition with the widest circulation in the area of intended employment.
(3) The advertisements must satisfy the requirements of paragraph (f) of this section. Documentation of this step can be satisfied by furnishing copies of the newspaper pages in which the advertisements appeared or proof of publication furnished by the newspaper.
(4) If the job involved in the application requires experience and an advanced degree, and a professional journal normally would be used to advertise the job opportunity, the employer may, in lieu of one of the Sunday advertisements, place an advertisement in the professional journal most likely to bring responses from able, willing, qualified, and available U.S. workers. Documentation of this step can be satisfied by providing a copy of the page in which the advertisement appeared.
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They are not "Out of date".
Like many things in US law, they have been deliberately ignored as time moves past them to ensure the laws no longer constrain them.
Most governments actually have no difficulty doing "Keeping the lights on" work like updating laws to reflect the times changing. Even here in the US, Republican state governments will have no difficulty keeping the lights on and running day to day tasks, and it usually moves at a reasonable clip.
Another good example of this is any time something comes up that a government body is very very for, it takes almost no time to actually get done. In principle, the turnaround time for a government to react to something can be a single day if necessary. Or less.
But the US Federal congress, explicitly Republicans, has purposely and explicitly and publicly made it a part of their platform to prevent the government from doing anything, including day to day tasks. The modern federal congress does so much less than it used to. On purpose.
Somehow the things that were trivial to do back with ink and quill are suddenly impossible to do in a timely manner. Because it's entirely by choice. Democrats aren't innocent, and are perfectly willing to not do their job when they can get away with it.
How to "fix" it depends a lot on exactly what your goals are.
Waa! Is that why I'm still unemployed, because I haven't been buying (or reading) newspapers...
I’m sure they’d find a reason to pass on anyone that does apply through those ads.
That's a systems question. We've had comments on HN before from people who post those ads because they're legally required to do so. The comment that I recall said (in my paraphrase):
- If you apply, you will not be hired, because we're only looking to hire the guy we already have in mind, who we're already working with under some other relationship.
- But, if you apply, that guy also won't be hired, because we proved to be able to fill the role locally.
- This annoys us and him and you.
From a systems perspective (and taking this description as accurate), if people make it their business to apply to those ads, it really will stop companies from using this method to get green cards for foreigners they'd like to employ. The downstream effects are open to question; maybe a given company will employ more domestic employees and maybe it will just keep using the same foreign contractors it's already using.
But then it is legally hazardous for them to hire the foreigner
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I heard that this rule is genuinely keeping the lights on for some local print media publications.
Socialism with extra steps.
Not that socialism is inherently bad, but why not just be honest about it and implement it more directly?
Who am I kidding, socialism is the bogeyman doing hero's duty sustaining unrestricted ultracapitalism.
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"?
It could be the Redmond paper in this case. That maybe has a few hundred readers.
The rule is pretty dumb in a country where people regularly move far for a job.
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> 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.
That's how I have been getting my last 6 jobs.
I never get a reply via indeed and the rest online.
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."
When the job is wfh, the entire globe is where the job is located. Are there any physical rags that are widely distributed globally?
Maybe it's time to rewrite the aged and archaic laws, instead of selectively applying them to a handful of companies...
Are all the position in Microsoft WFH?
I have several friends who works in Microsoft and would disagree
If the job is WFH, is green card applicable?
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But if the job is located in Redmond, does that mean widely distributed in Redmond itself, or the Eastside, or all King County, or the whole Puget Sound area?
That's usually what a judge decides.
Anyway, I went checking and I wasn't able to find any opening in Microsoft in the Seattle times online version. Which is definitely not a nice optics and would play unfortunately well with the current allegations
The point of a green card is "Nobody in the US was able to do this job"
In that context, "Widely distributed" really shouldn't be such a complicated concept. What does the NYT charge to run a classified ad?
"Nobody in redmond could do this job!". Cool, did you try any of the other 49 states at all? No? Then go away.
> 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.
> If the rules weren’t designed from the outset to facilitate fraud
I wouldn't default to assuming malice. These laws were written by extremely old people who are still living in the 1950s, where they think the paper boy still rides up on his bicycle on Sunday to deliver the news paper to them, and that's the only way to read about jobs.
These are Department of Labor regulations that are updated with some frequency.
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.
Oh come on, if a company is placing job ads to comply with the letter of this law in 2026 they're 100% exploiting the process Vance outlines and would undoubtedly try to exploit whatever the replacement process was as well.
Nothing prevents the administration from changing the law then, last time I checked their party holds all three branches of government + SCOTUS.
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Following the published guidelines is not exploiting them. If the government doesn’t like their own guidelines, they should change them.
Agreed, if a company wants to fill roles it advertises on linked in. Maybe the rules need updating.
Where "100% exploiting the process" means complying 100% with the standards.
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Not really. Meta had to change advertising to allow online applications.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-labor-depart...
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.