Facebook to pay up to $14 Million to settle lawsuit that it illegally reserved jobs for immigrants

Big tech companies have long advocated for importing cheap foreign labor. Rather than training American workers to learn the necessary skills, they bring in foreign workers to improve their bottom line.

Hence, it was no surprise this week that Facebook settled a lawsuit with the federal government over illegally reserving jobs for immigrant workers through the H-1B visa program.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal,

Facebook Inc. has agreed to pay a financial penalty as part of settlements with the U.S. government that had accused the social-media company of illegally reserving lucrative jobs for immigrant workers it was sponsoring for permanent residence instead of searching for and considering available U.S. workers.

Facebook will pay $4.75 million to the U.S. government and as much as $9.5 million to eligible victims of the alleged discrimination, the Justice Department said, in what it called the largest fine and financial award its civil-rights division has ever made

As CAPS has routinely pointed out, the H-1B visa program was designed to provide businesses with specialized workers unavailable in America. Instead, tech companies have used contrived worker shortages to convert the program into, in the words of Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, one that is “plagued with fraud and abuse and is now a vehicle for outsourcing that deprives qualified American workers of their jobs.”

As the Journal explained,

The lawsuit alleged that, though Facebook followed all the advertising and recruiting requirements for these jobs, it didn’t publicize the openings as extensively as it normally would. Facebook didn’t advertise the positions on its website, and required candidates to mail in their applications rather than accepting them online.

Now we see Facebook’s hypocrisy in full view. It issues woke statements of support for Black Lives Matter while obstructing Americans from applying for jobs at Facebook and doing little to train and hire African American workers. The statistics don’t lie. Just 1.7% of Facebook’s tech employees are Black and only 4.3% are Latino. Blacks hold only 3.4% of leadership positions, while Latinos hold 4.3%.

One might hope that Facebook would make significant changes after its settlement with the federal government, but don’t hold your breath. The tech giant should change course and lead Silicon Valley in not just issuing meaningless platitudes, but instead training and recruiting American workers, including African Americans.