Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

Reaction to the article and media framing

• Many readers found the article’s tone condescending toward tech workers (e.g., “chronically-online,” “don’t know how to use a post office”) and thought it weirdly hostile to the people harmed.
• Some distrust The Hill and similar outlets, seeing them as politically motivated and framing the issue in a nativist way rather than explaining the underlying law.

How the hidden-job system actually works (PERM vs H‑1B)

• Key distinction: this is mostly about PERM-based green card sponsorship, not initial H‑1B hiring.
• To sponsor an employee for permanent residency, companies must show they tried and failed to hire a qualified U.S. worker.
• Common tactics: posting in obscure physical newspapers, requiring mail-in applications, or otherwise making ads hard to find and apply to, sometimes with highly tailored requirements to match an existing worker.
• Several commenters say this is a widely known “legal charade” many large firms and consultancies use, sometimes at significant scale.

Why companies do it

• Often they already have a specific foreign worker (H‑1B or internal transfer) they want to retain, and don’t want to risk replacing them with a local applicant.
• Others argue the deeper motive is leverage: visa-tied employees are less likely to quit, more likely to tolerate worse conditions and hours, and thus cheaper in total even at similar nominal salary.
• There’s disagreement over whether this is mostly cost/leverage, simple pipeline (many CS grads are foreign), or also ethnic/caste favoritism.

Impact on U.S. workers and labor markets

• Many U.S. engineers report hundreds of unanswered applications and see this as direct exclusion from roles they are qualified for.
• Several argue that expanding the labor pool via H‑1B suppresses wages even if individual immigrants are paid similarly to citizens.
• Others counter that immigration overall grows the economic “pie” and that the real issues are domestic education, debt, and weak labor protections.

Discrimination, racism, and networks

• Long subthread on whether some Indian managers favor co-nationals or specific castes, with claims of both nepotism and strong pushback about evidence.
• Broader point: people of all backgrounds tend to hire from their own networks; what’s debated is whether this crosses into systemic racial or caste discrimination.
• DEI is contested: some see it as necessary guardrails; others view it as misapplied and occasionally producing reverse discrimination.

Enforcement, penalties, and law

• DOJ settlements with major tech firms over PERM practices are seen as symbolic: fines are tiny relative to revenue, executives face no personal liability.
• Some insist this is straightforward fraud against the stated purpose of labor-certification law; others say companies are simply following badly designed, politically compromised rules.
• There’s frustration that corporate abuses get modest civil settlements while low-wage undocumented workers face harsh enforcement.

Proposed reforms and alternatives

• Salary-based H‑1B allocation (or Dutch-auction style) to favor truly high-skill, high-wage roles and make cost-cutting abuses uneconomic.
• “Gold card” ideas: high-cost, employer-independent work visas with free job mobility, versus today’s employer-tied H‑1B.
• Raising required wages for visa holders above local averages; or making corporate sponsors pay large, non-transferable fees.
• Moving from firm-by-firm “fake search” PERM to national, data-driven labor-shortage tests; or a points-based system like other countries.
• More radical views: abolish H‑1B entirely, sharply limit employment-based green cards for commodity roles, or impose country caps to prevent concentration in a few nationalities.

Worker responses and tools

• A site (jobs.now) republishes hidden PERM ads to make them visible; one company reportedly sent legal threats over this.
• Some suggest a national registry of willing workers, or a mandatory, public PERM job database with standardized, searchable postings.
• Several note that modern LLMs make it easier for individuals to learn employment law, structure discrimination complaints, and document patterns of mistreatment, though others warn that AI-drafted messages can backfire legally.

Bigger-picture tensions

• Underneath is a clash between:
  • People prioritizing national labor protection and wage levels,
  • Those prioritizing open talent flows and competitiveness, and
  • Frustration with an immigration system that imports exploitable labor yet makes permanent status slow and arbitrary.
• Many see offshoring and visa pipelines as parallel tools serving the same corporate goal: cheaper, more controllable labor, with AI now used as a convenient public scapegoat for what is largely policy- and incentive-driven.