The ruse that lets big tech dodge Trump's immigration crackdown

It’s a tough time for the rank-and-file tech worker or computer science graduate looking for a job. The Silicon Valley giants have laid off tens of thousands in the past couple years. The longstanding threat of offshoring persists, while the new threat of AI looms.

There is seemingly one reason for hope, which you won’t find in popular hiring websites like Indeed.com or ZipRecruiter. It’s exclusively in the help-wanted classifieds in printed newspapers. Every Sunday, metropolitan newspapers across the country are full of listings for tech jobs, with posted salaries sometimes exceeding $150,000. If you’ve got tech skills, it seems, employers are crying out for you, week after week.

One day this spring, I decided to test this premise. I set out with the classified pages from the most recent Sunday edition of The Washington Post, which were laden with tech job offerings in the suburbs of Northern Virginia and Montgomery County, Maryland.

First, I drove to the address given for one of the employers, Sapphire Software Solutions, whose ad said it was looking for someone to “gather and analyze data and business requirements to facilitate various scrum ceremonies for multiple business systems and processes.” I arrived at an office building in Ashburn, Virginia, near Dulles International Airport. But the receptionist in the appointed suite looked confused when I asked for Sapphire.

“This is virtual office,” she said, in a heavy Eastern European accent. “We have many kinds of virtual offices.” She gestured at a long filing-cabinet drawer that was open behind her, full of folders. “You must mail to them.”

From there, I drove 2 miles to another company advertising for help, Optimum Systems, whose address turned out to be an office park full of dental practices. But the office door said nothing about Optimum, instead carrying a sign for an accountant and a different tech firm. It was dark and empty.

And from there, I drove 6 miles to a company called Softrams, which was advertising for a “Full Stack Developer.” I walked into an office in a building that also housed a driving school. The reception area was empty. I called hello, and a woman appeared. I told her I was a reporter wanting to learn more about the listing. She was surprised and asked if she could read the ad in my hand. “I’ll check with the team and get back to you,” she said.

A few days later, after similarly mysterious visits to other offices, I reached the woman, Praveena Divi, on the phone. “This ad is for a PERM filing,” she said. “A filing for a green card.”

To anybody familiar with the PERM system, those words meant the ad was not really intended to find applicants. I had entered one of the most overlooked yet consequential corners of the United States immigration system: the process by which employers sponsor tech workers with temporary H-1B visas as a first step to getting them the green card that entitles them to permanent residency in the U.S. It is a process that nearly everyone involved admits is nonsensical, highly vulnerable to abuse, as well as a contributor to inequities among domestic and foreign tech workers.

Yet the system has endured for decades, largely out of public view. There is occasional debate over the roughly 120,000 workers from overseas who are awarded H-1B visas every year for temporary high-skilled employment. Last December, a tiff erupted between billionaire entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, on the one side, and MAGA champions including Steve Bannon, over the formers’ claims that H-1B workers are needed because the homegrown tech workforce is inadequate. But almost as quickly as it started, the spat vanished from the news.

There is even less attention given to what happens with these foreign workers — three quarters of whom are now from India — when many decide they want to stay beyond the six-year maximum allowed for an H-1B recipient (a three-year term can be renewed once). To qualify for a green card, workers must get their employers to sponsor them via the Permanent Labor Certification process, aka PERM. And to do that, employers must demonstrate that they made a sincere effort to find someone else — a U.S. citizen or permanent resident — to do the job instead.

What’s striking about this requirement is that, as a result of choices made by legislators 35 years ago, the effort to find a citizen is not expected at the front end, when employers are considering hiring workers from abroad. At that point, employers simply enter the lottery for H-1Bs, and if they get one, they can use it.

Only once a company has employed someone for five or six years and become committed to helping that person stay in the country permanently must the company show that it is trying to find someone else. It’s no surprise that the efforts at this point can be less than sincere.

This is where the newspaper ads come in. Under U.S. Department of Labor rules dating back to the era before the worldwide web, employers must post the job for which PERM certification is being sought for 30 days with a state workforce agency and in two successive Sunday newspapers in the job’s location.

This makes for a highly ironic juxtaposition: pages of print ads paid for by tech employers, many of them the same Silicon Valley giants that have helped eviscerate newspaper classifieds and drive down print newspaper circulation to the point that it can be hard even to find a place to buy a paper in many communities.

These columns of ads that are not really looking for applicants underscore the challenges facing American tech workers and the striking disparities in the current immigration landscape. While restaurants, meatpackers and countless other businesses now risk having workers targeted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, tech employers have largely escaped Trump administration scrutiny for their use of foreign labor. Among the companies sponsoring many H-1B employees for green cards every year are ones aligned with President Donald Trump, such as Oracle, Palantir and Musk’s Tesla.

But the PERM system also takes a toll on its supposed beneficiaries, the temporary employees seeking permanent residency. Even after their PERM applications are approved, they must typically wait more than 10 years before getting a green card, a long wait even by the standards of the U.S. immigration system. In the interim, it can be hard for them to leave their sponsoring employers, which exposes them to overwork at jobs that often pay less than what their American counterparts receive.

Whichever way you look at it, said Ronil Hira, a Howard University political science professor and research associate at the Economic Policy institute, the PERM process is crying out for reform. As he put it, “Everyone in the industry knows it’s a joke.”

Divi, the manager at Softrams, was quite forthcoming about how PERM works at the 450-person company, whose largest client is the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and which was bought last year by another company, Tria. She told me that Softrams had 69 employees on H-1B visas, had never hired another applicant during the PERM process and had received zero applicants from the latest ads.

I had a much harder time getting through to Sapphire Software Solutions, the company with the mail-drop in Ashburn, whose website states that it’s “a leading provider of IT staffing solutions and services since 2011” and that it also has offices in the Northern California town of Dublin, plus Hyderabad, India. The company’s phone directory offers options for, among others, “recruiting” and “immigration.” When I chose the latter, I reached a man who sounded surprised by the call and said, “Give me some time.” I never heard back from him, so I called back days later and pushed the option for “recruiting.” This time, the person who answered hung up on me. Finally, I picked the option for human resources and reached a woman who told me to send an email. I did, and never heard back.

Fortunately, one can learn a lot about the PERM process from Department of Labor records, which list all of the roughly 90,000 PERM applications submitted every year. The 2024 list shows Sapphire with 51 applications — a striking number for a company that gives its size as 252 employees. The jobs include computer systems analysts offered $96,158, software developers offered $100,240 and web developers offered $128,731. All of the applications were approved by the government, as is true of virtually all applications under the PERM process.

The federal listings don’t list the names of the employees whom the companies are sponsoring for PERM certification, but they do show their nationalities and where they received their degrees. All but one of Sapphire’s 51 were from India; their degrees came from a mix of American institutions (among them the University of South Florida and University of Michigan-Flint) and Indian ones (among them Visvesvaraya Technological University and Periyar University.)

All of the Sapphire applications were advertised in The Washington Post. And all list the same immigration attorney, Soo Park in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I called and asked her about the company’s applications. Sapphire, she said, is “just one of the companies I do.” I inquired about the PERM process, and she demurred, telling me to ask AI instead.

I encountered similar resistance and intrigue when I made the rounds in a different metro area with a burgeoning tech sector: Columbus, Ohio. Here also, several of the job listings in The Columbus Dispatch led to empty or abandoned offices or to buildings that were mail-drops for dozens of companies.

When I sought out Vizion Technologies, which had listed three jobs, I found a single-story office park in Dublin, a suburb of Columbus. Vizion’s office, adjacent to that of a cleaning company, was empty, save for a Keurig machine and some magazines. I called the company’s number and asked the man who answered about the listings. “This is a PERM ad,” he said freely. But, he said, he would consider other applicants. Had any come across the transom? I asked. No, he said. “But you never know.”

After an unilluminating visit to another company, I headed to EDI-Matrix, which had advertised for software programmers. At the company’s small office, I met John Sheppard, a manager. He said the owner, Shafiullah Syed, was for the time being in India, where a quarter of the company’s 40 employees were based, and where 20 of the Ohio-based staff was from. The company, founded in 2008, provides tech support for state government and private-sector clients.

Were the ads in the Dispatch for PERM applicants? I asked. “Probably,” Sheppard said. “Our owner is a big believer in trying to find ways to help people.”

The story of how the PERM system — the full name is Program Electronic Review Management — came to be is a decadeslong tale of, depending on your perspective, misguided assumptions or self-interested machinations. Since the middle of the 20th century, temporary guest-worker programs had been on a separate track from employment-based permanent residency programs. It was difficult for guest workers to apply for permanent residency, a process that had long required employers to prove that they couldn’t find an American worker for the role.

But those separate tracks converged with the 1990 Immigration Act. Bruce Morrison, who helped draft the law as a Connecticut Democrat serving as chair of the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship, told me that the law’s goal was to constrict the use of temporary labor from abroad.

Previously, employers had been able to hire unlimited numbers of temporary skilled workers under vague language about “distinguished merit and ability.” The 1990 law created a new H-1B category that required a bachelor’s degree, established a cap of 65,000 visas per year and set a minimum wage level. Still, it spared employers from having to prove they couldn’t find U.S. workers for the job in question, on the logic that these were just temps filling a short-term role.

The hope, Morrison said, was to encourage employers to bring in skilled workers via the permanent residency pathway, on the theory that immigrants with green cards would, by being on stronger footing, be less likely to undercut wages for Americans than guest workers did.

Things worked out much differently. The law passed on the cusp of the Internet era as the job market was pushing toward shorter-term employment, especially in the tech world. A rapidly growing middle class in Asia was producing millions of tech workers eager to work in the U.S., especially English-speaking Indians.

And, crucially, the law allowed H-1B holders to apply for permanent residency.

Within just a few years, three-quarters of those applying for employer-based permanent residency were people who were already working for the employer in question, mostly on H-1Bs. Thus was created the backward situation of employers having to prove that they were looking for qualified applicants for a role that they had already filled with the person they were sponsoring. Their recruitment efforts were “perfunctory at best and a sham at worst,” wrote the Department of Labor’s office of inspector general in a scathing 1996 report.

The report found that there had been more than 136,000 applicants for 18,011 PERM openings that it examined, but that only 104 people were hired via advertisements — less than 1% — and those hirings were almost accidental. (The companies kept the foreign workers they were sponsoring, but came across a tiny smattering of qualified Americans, whom they also hired.) “The system is seriously flawed,” the report stated. “The programs are being manipulated and abused.”

In the years that followed, the demand for H-1B visas surged, due partly to the demand for Indian tech workers to assist with the Y2K threat and to the tech-bubble burst prompting companies to seek lower-wage workers. Under pressure from the tech industry, the government raised the cap for several years, as high as 195,000 visas annually, between 2001 and 2003.

This exacerbated a bottleneck already in the making: Tens of thousands of H-1B holders, many from India, were now seeking permanent residency as their visas neared expiration, but under the law, no single nationality could receive more than 7% of the 140,000 employment-based green cards awarded in a given year. Workers who had been approved for permanent residency could remain on extended H-1Bs while they waited for their green card, but this was an unstable limbo that further swelled the ranks of H-1Bs.

In 2005, the Department of Labor tried to address at least one part of the pipeline, the delays in approving employees for permanent residency. It introduced the new PERM process, which allowed employers simply to attest that the position in question was open to U.S. workers, that any who applied were rejected for job-related reasons and that the offered pay was at least the prevailing wage for that role. Employers also had to submit a report describing the recruitment steps taken and the number of U.S. applicants rejected. It was at this point that the print advertising requirement was clarified as two successive Sunday newspapers.

It became quickly apparent how easy it was for employers to game the system. Many advertised completely different positions in the newspaper ads compared to their own websites. Some directed applicants to send resumes to the company’s immigration lawyers rather than to human resources.

A viral video captured the absurdity. At a 2007 panel discussion, an immigration lawyer, Lawrence Lebowitz, laid out the mission in startlingly candid terms: “Our goal here of course is to meet the requirements, No. 1, but also do so as inexpensively as possible, keeping in mind our goal. And our goal is clearly not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker. In a sense, that sounds funny, but it’s what we’re trying to do here.”

The video caused a flurry of outrage, yet the system has survived to this day, largely unchanged, protected by congressional dysfunction and the interests that are served by the status quo, the tech industry and the immigration law bar.

Advocacy groups representing American tech workers have attacked the system repeatedly, challenging the notion that H-1Bs are bringing in the world’s “best and brightest” by pointing out that the program makes no attempt to identify exceptional talent beyond requiring a bachelor’s degree, relying instead on a lottery to award the visas. The real appeal of H-1Bs for employers, worker advocates say, is that they can pay their holders an average of 10% to 20% less, as several studies have found to be the case, which has helped suppress tech wages more broadly.

Yet the advocacy groups have struggled to mobilize sustained opposition. There was talk during the Obama administration of reforming PERM, but it fizzled amid the failure of broader immigration reform during his second term.

In 2020, the Department of Labor’s inspector general issued another critical report, calling attention to PERM’s vulnerability to abuse. It noted that when the department did full audit reviews of applications, which it did for 16% of them, it wound up rejecting a fifth of them, far more than the mere 3% that were rejected during the standard review. That suggested that many faulty applications were slipping through. “The PERM program relentlessly has employers not complying with the qualifying criteria,” it concluded.

As for the newspaper ad requirement, the report noted with understatement, “Available data indicates newspapers are becoming a less effective means of notifying potential applicants in the U.S. about job opportunities. … U.S. workers are likely to be unaware of these employment opportunities due to the obsolete methods required.”

Since that report, there have been two notable bids for accountability. In December 2020, the Department of Justice filed suit against Facebook, alleging that the company was discriminating against U.S. citizens by routinely reserving jobs for PERM applicants. In a settlement nearly a year later, Facebook, which had denied any discrimination, agreed to pay a civil penalty of $4.75 million, pay up to $9.5 million to eligible victims of the alleged discrimination and conduct more expansive recruitment for slots in PERM applications.

In 2023, the DOJ announced a similar settlement with Apple, which also denied any discriminatory behavior but agreed to pay up to $25 million in back pay and civil penalties, conduct more expansive recruitment, train employees in anti-discrimination requirements and submit to DOJ monitoring for three years.

And yet, the PERM process carries on, with its own ecosystem. One firm, Atlas Advertising, offers the specific service of advertising jobs intended for PERM applicants. “Expertly place your immigration ads in leading newspapers, ensuring compliance and targeted reach for PERM certification,” Atlas urges potential customers.

I searched in vain for defenders of the process — major tech lobby groups either declined to comment or didn’t return my calls. Theresa Cardinal Brown has lobbied on immigration policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Immigration Lawyers Association, but she, too, was critical of PERM. “Even if you are trying to sponsor someone who is already on the job, you have to act as if you aren’t,” she said. “Increasingly, this jury-rigged system isn’t working for anyone.”

Among those now decrying the system the most sharply is Morrison, the former Democratic congressman who helped write the 1990 law. In 2017, he told “60 Minutes” that H-1B “has been hijacked as the main highway to bring people from abroad and displace Americans.”

Morrison, who is now a lobbyist, was even more outspoken when I talked with him. He noted the H-1B caps have grown in recent years. The 65,000 cap laid out in 1990 no longer includes the thousands renewed every year, and there are an additional 20,000 visas for people with graduate degrees and 35,000-odd exemptions for universities, nonprofits and research organizations. This adds up to about 120,000 new H-1Bs per year. Meanwhile, the per-country cap for employer-based green cards last year was 11,200. The backlog of workers and family members awaiting green cards, mostly Indians, has swelled to more than 1 million, creating a vast army of what Morrison and others call “indentured” workers who are at the mercy of their employers.

“It’s fair to say that no American has ever gotten a job due to the certification system,” Morrison said. “It doesn’t do what it should do.”

One day, after many more hang-ups on calls to Sapphire Software Solutions, the company with the mail-drop in Ashburn and 51 PERM applications on last year’s Department of Labor list, I finally reached one of their managers, Phani Reddy Gottimukkala.

I asked him whether the company had gotten any responses to its recent ads in The Washington Post. “That will be taken care of by the immigration department,” he said. More broadly, he said the PERM process was working well for the company. “Everything is fine because we have very strong attorneys working for us.”