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

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.

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.

> 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.

Those are some seriously out of touch requirements that could easily be fixed if anyone in power actually wanted to.

[delayed]

Waa! Is that why I'm still unemployed, because I haven't been buying (or reading) newspapers...

I heard that this rule is genuinely keeping the lights on for some local print media publications.

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.

> • 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"?

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!

> 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."

Sounds like a good time to start responding to newspaper job ads

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.