The United States Department of Justice has reportedly sued Facebook, Inc., the Silicon Valley based social networking giant, alleging that the company discriminated against American workers by essentially reserving positions of employment at the company for temporary, or more accurately H1-B, visa holders.

The DOJ claimed that Facebook has, in essence, ‘refused’ to hire, recruit, or even consider qualified U.S. workers for over 2,600 jobs positions, which, in a majority of the cases, paid an average salary of over $156,000 annually. Instead, the company opted to fill out these positions with temporary work visa holders, especially ones with H-1B visas.

In fact, the DOJ, in an official statement, stated that Facebook intentionally designed a hiring system that allowed it to deny qualified American workers fair opportunities to get to learn about and to apply for jobs at the company.

Adding that the social media giant instead looked to route such job openings to foreign workers with a temporary work visa that it wanted to sponsor for permanent residency or green cards.

For the record, H-1B visas are typically used by the U.S. technology sector companies to bring highly skilled guest workers from other countries to the United States. However, several critics claim that the laws that govern these visas are considerably lax, which makes it way too easy for these enterprises to replace U.S. workers with foreign labor that is often times much more cheaper.

Commenting on the DOJ allegations, Facebook spokesman Daniel Roberts stated that the company has been readily cooperating with the U.S. DOJ in its investigation of this issue. Roberts further added that while Facebook disputes these allegations, it cannot comment at length on the pending litigation.

The DOJ – Facebook lawsuit is one of the latest instances of Trump administration butting heads with the Silicon Valley in an attempt to restrict immigration for outside workers.

Source credit: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/03/facebook-h1b-visa-jobs-trump-department-of-justice