I think everyone would agree that the PERM process is an awful process for both applicants and for employers. The job is supposed to be treated as an open position and the recruitment is supposed to be done in good faith. So, if a qualified, willing, able, and available U.S. worker applies for a PERM job, the employer either must hire this person or terminate the PERM process and wait at least 6 months before restarting it. Now, where there are multiple openings for the position, then it's possible for an employer to hire a U.S. worker without terminating the PERM process for the foreign national employee.

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BeetleB 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The job is supposed to be treated as an open position and the recruitment is supposed to be done in good faith. So, if a qualified, willing, able, and available U.S. worker applies for a PERM job, the employer either must hire this person or terminate the PERM process and wait at least 6 months before restarting it.

The "or" part in the last sentence is worth noting. At the place I've worked, the employer invokes the second clause (i.e. PERM process is canceled/suspended, and they try again 6-12 months later).

The way it worked there was: Employer publishes an open req. We get lots of resumes. Manager calls the few people who may be a match. Then the manager has to justify why the person doesn't have the skills and the process continues.

Sometimes (and this is likely a bit random), the government does an audit, where they get the details of all who applied. Then they call the manager and start grilling him on why a particular candidate was rejected. If the manager can convince them, the PERM process continues. If not, they fail the Department of Labor Certification and the PERM process is canceled.

The person doesn't lose his job. They're just ineligible and need to apply again after a certain window.

I do know folks applying for PERM who were rejected twice because of this. The insane thing was that their roles (EE with specific specialty) were legitimately hard to fill, whereas other people in the team doing trivial scripting easily got through PERM.

The process is messed up in many ways.

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jmyeet an hour ago | parent [-]

Generally lawyers need to be involved to make sure any rejections are compliant. There's a whole cottage industry around this.

Personally, given the state of unemployment in the tech sector right now, I think it should be virtually impossible to fill a PERM right now because pretty much any position could be filled with a US LPR or citizen and the only reason it isn't is because the whole process is deliberately obfuscated or artificial barriers are put up purposefully to disqualify candidates.

I also think that doing layoffs in the US should disqualify you from doing any PERM or sponsoring any visa for 2-3 years.

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BeetleB an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> I also think that doing layoffs in the US should disqualify you from doing any PERM or sponsoring any visa for 2-3 years.

This is a very SW mindset, and makes no sense in other circumstances.

If my company canceled a large SW project, and laid off a lot of SW folks, why should that prevent them from sponsoring someone to work on nanoelectronics?

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bubblethink an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Since we are doing wishes and grievances, why have PERM at all?

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jmyeet 19 minutes ago | parent [-]

The specificied purpose of PERM is to to fill a position that otherwiswe can't be filled by a US LPR or citizen..

If you need to hide your job postings on an internal physical caulk board in a basement and post them in only physical copies of The Columbus Dispatch then it should be pretty clear you're not following the spirit of the program. If, even after doing that, you then disqualify candidates for pretty fake reasons and you somehow still have qualified candidates so you pull the position and try again in 6-12 months then you should absolutely fail a USCIS audit and you should lose your privileges for hiring foreign workers and sponsoring people for residency, at least for a time.

Legitimate employers and jobs can't get a visa in the H1B lottery because of widespread visa abuse. People from certain countries (particularly India) have to wait 10-15+ years because of abuse of the system. Fake employers with H1B schemes, bodyshops that really pay below prevailing wage and can keep Indian-born people as effectively indentured servants, spamming the system with H1B applications because they don't really care how many they get.

We're in permanent layoff culture now where pretty much every sufficiently-sized employer will probably fire 5-10% of their staff every year while still hiring people. This is to suppress wages and make people do more work for free. There should be a cost to this.

If you're an immigrant, a completely arbitrary layoff can be devastating. You have a short period to find a new job and if you don't, you have to leave the country. Employers who will do that to immigrants shouldn't be alloweed to hire immigrants.

You can be both pro-immigration and anti-immigration abuse.

	▲	bubblethink 5 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You are conflating several unrelated issues. In your previous post, you expressed how you wish PERM worked ("I also think that doing layoffs in the US should disqualify you from doing any PERM or sponsoring any visa for 2-3 years."), to which my response was why have PERM at all. You are still talking about how you wish the world worked. There are a lot of shoulds in your reply. PERM, H-1B, etc. all exist as a carefully brokered compromise bw different factions that want different things. It is the correct amount of broken by design. Posting in a Sunday newspaper is a requirement in the regulations. Everyone is in the right amount of compliance to maintain equilibrium. There are any number of things that could be or should be, but aren't.
	▲	BeetleB 11 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> People from certain countries (particularly India) have to wait 10-15+ years because of abuse of the system. Well, the abuse is mostly happening for the benefit of people from India. But yes, it sucks that the "good" people from India have to wait a long time because of the system being abused to get the "not-so-good" Indians. Keep in mind, though, that you're conflating H1-B with PERM. There isn't a 10-15 year wait for H1-B.

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foobiekr 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It is well known at the companies that I've worked for that there is no good faith at all in the process and it's basically ritual to justify the application.

Since they are clearly violating the law, how can I report this?

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ianhawes 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If they've complied with the DOL regulations and requirements, what makes you think they're violating the law?

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foobiekr 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Explicitly and openly not acting in good faith.

	▲	bubblethink 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That is your contention though. The government needs to prove that in a court of law that they are violating the statute or the regulations.

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proberts 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The government agencies involved are the DOL and USCIS so you would report abuses/violations to them.