‘Deliberately avoiding them’: How Big Tech quietly locks out Americans

In a time when Americans face mounting student debt, stagnant wages and increasing job competition, a little-known government program continues to certify hundreds of thousands of permanent jobs for foreign workers, even when qualified U.S. citizens are available, willing and able.

The labor certification process known as “PERM” (Program Electronic Review Management) allows employers to sponsor foreign nationals for green cards only if no qualified U.S. worker is available. According to federal law, employers must first complete a good-faith test of the U.S. labor market, which includes specific recruitment steps such as two Sunday newspaper ads, internal postings and three additional recruitment methods from a Department of Labor-approved list.

But in practice, employers can exploit the outdated list of approved recruitment methods by avoiding major online platforms and even their own company career sites. Instead, they often use limited-access alternatives such as obscure job boards, local or ethnic newspapers, or short-duration radio ads that technically satisfy the rules on paper, but drastically reduce the chances that qualified U.S. workers will ever see or apply for the position.

In 2024, the Department of Labor processed 116,427 PERM applications to hire foreign workers, approving nearly 88% of them. Only 5.4% (6,364) were denied. This means tens of thousands of U.S. jobs were certified for foreign workers without a transparent or fair recruitment process. The Department of Labor publishes quarterly data on employer applications to sponsor foreign workers, including both H-1B and PERM filings, which offers insight into the hiring and immigration practices of U.S. employers and their immigration attorneys.

An analysis of PERM filings from 2020 to 2024 reveals how major U.S. technology companies use the green card sponsorship process to secure foreign labor for high-paying roles, often without conducting genuine or competitive hiring searches. The data show consistent reliance on minimal recruitment efforts, including outdated tactics like requiring U.S. applicants to submit paper resumes by mail.

These methods, previously flagged by the Department of Justice as barriers to American workers, were often used even by large tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Workday.

For example, PERM-required job ads published in the May 9, 2021, print edition of the Mercury News instructed jobseekers to apply via postal mail, despite the fact that these companies already had digital hiring systems in place.

Similar tactics triggered a high-profile federal investigation involving Facebook – now Meta. In 2021, the Department of Justice and the Department of Labor reached a settlement with Facebook after alleging it had intentionally implemented PERM recruitment in a way to deter U.S. applicants. According to the complaint, Facebook did not post PERM roles on its public careers page and it required submission of resumes by physical mail, methods the DOJ concluded discouraged American workers from applying:

“Facebook created a separate hiring process for PERM positions that intentionally discouraged U.S. workers from applying. For example, while Facebook typically accepts applications online, it required that applications for PERM positions be submitted by mail only.”

“Facebook used recruitment methods for PERM positions that were less effective than those it used for other positions, intentionally deterring U.S. workers from applying to positions that the company sought to fill with temporary visa holders.”

As part of its settlement, Facebook was required to change its PERM practices, posting jobs on its public website, accepting electronic applications and using the same hiring processes for PERM roles as for other jobs. The company also agreed to federal oversight, employee training and regular reporting on its hiring activity.

Since then, industry reports on the platform Blind show that Meta has seen a rise in PERM denials, suggesting that when forced to conduct fair recruitment, companies do in fact encounter qualified American candidates.

The evidence is overwhelming that companies like Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Google and others, despite consistently lobbying for more foreign-worker visas on the basis of a so-called “talent shortage,” are fully capable of finding qualified Americans when they are actually required to recruit them.

Indeed, when employers go to such lengths to avoid recruiting qualified U.S. workers, even under a program like PERM that explicitly requires a good-faith labor market test, their own actions contradict claims of a shortage. The evidence suggests it is not that they can’t find qualified Americans, it’s that they are deliberately avoiding them.

If this is happening in a program like PERM, which includes at least some legal safeguards and penalties, the risks are far greater under programs like H-1B and STEM OPT, which contain no such protections for U.S. workers. Without enforcement or accountability, these visa channels allow companies to bypass the domestic workforce entirely, undermining both the integrity of the labor market and the future of American employment.