President Donald Trump’s aide and the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the US Department of Justice, Harmeet Dhillon, spoke about her department’s action against the discrimination of Americans in US jobs. Speaking to Texas journalist Sara Gonzales, who busts alleged H-1B abuses on her show, Dhillon said she used to call the IT bodyshops ‘software pimps’ when she was working in Silicon Valley. Dhillon explained the economy of IT bodyshops or staffing companies that bring H-1Bs from overseas and then place them with clients. These staffing companies, she said, often trade these H-1Bs within themselves because they can’t sponsor all of them, and she called it a ‘human trafficking’ operation.Dhillion said there are three to four middlemen who are getting their cuts from what a company is paying an engineer and hence the H-1B workers are getting way less salary and sometimes no salary. The last middleman is probably paying nothing to the engineer but the engineer can’t protest because if they lose their jobs, they lose their visa and would be deported.“Silicon Valley body shops specialize in faking up resumes. Some people might be extraordinary but a lot of this is fakery. And on top of that, these people are subject to restrictions on moving jobs, have lower salaries, don’t have economic mobility, and can be exploited. It is a toxic situation, plus the job market excludes Americans,” Dhillon said.On companies posting ‘H-1B only’ jobs, Dhillon said there are different types of visa categories and there’s a lot of misconceptions around them.“There’s a category called PERM which requires an employers to first prove that they weren’t able to find an American before they hire a foreign worker, And that’s where we are finding quite a bit of fruad becauyse they’re advertising these jobs in places that make it impossible for the normal American worker who applies for jobs online to even find out about it. So they’ll apply in some obscure foriegn-only job board or in the middle of the night or something weird,” Dhillon said, citing a recent case settlement with OpenAI.The H-1B visa program does not require employers to prove that an American was not available for the job. “However, our overarching federal civil rights laws make nationality discrimination a violation of federal employment law. Before this administration, no one considered anti-American discrimination to be national origin discrimination. But American is a national origin, whethet you are born here or a naturalized citizen. If we are being undercut, that’s also discrimination,” Dhillon said.PERM is the first step of Green Card sponsorship, where an employer submits an application to the Department of Labor for an employee’s permanent residency. The employer has to certify that hiring a foreign worker won’t displace American workers or lower their wages.
OpenAI’s PERM abuse settlement
In August, the Department of Justice secured a combined $3,200,000 settlement with OpenAI addressing allegations that the company discriminated against US workers and instead preferred workers with temporary employment visas.OpenAI did not advertise positions it sought to fill through the PERM program on its external job website. OpenAI also required applicants to mail paper applications for positions advertised as part of PERM recruitment, even though the company permitted electronic applications for other positions. In addition, OpenAI took other steps to discourage US workers from applying, such as advertising positions on the radio late at night.
