Harmeet Dhillon appeared on Sara Gonzales’ show and spoke about H-1B abuse and PERM fraud.
Because they can’t sponsor all of them, and she called it a ‘human trafficking’ operation, these staffing companies, she said, often trade these H-1Bs within themselves.
Speaking to Texas journalist Sara Gonzales, who busts alleged H-1B abuses on her show, Dhillon said she used to call the IT bodyshops ‘software pimps’ when she was working in Silicon Valley. So they’ll apply in some obscure foriegn-only job board or in the middle of the night or something weird,” Dhillon said, citing a recent case settlement with OpenAI. President Donald Trump’s aide and the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the US Department of Justice, Harmeet Dhillon, spoke about her department’s action against the discrimination of Americans in US jobs. Dhillon explained the economy of IT bodyshops or staffing companies that bring H-1Bs from overseas and then place them with clients. “There’s a category called PERM which requires an employers to first prove that they weren’t able to find an American before they hire a foreign worker, And that’s where we are finding quite a bit of fruad becauyse they’re advertising these jobs in places that make it impossible for the normal American worker who applies for jobs online to even find out about it.
In August, the Department of Justice secured a combined $3,200,000 settlement with OpenAI addressing allegations that the company discriminated against US workers and instead preferred workers with temporary employment visas. The employer has to certify that hiring a foreign worker won’t displace American workers or lower their wages.
If we are being undercut, that’s also discrimination,” Dhillon said. The H-1B visa program does not require employers to prove that an American was not available for the job. “However, our overarching federal civil rights laws make nationality discrimination a violation of federal employment law. Before this administration, no one considered anti-American discrimination to be national origin discrimination. But American is a national origin, whethet you are born here or a naturalized citizen. PERM is the first step of Green Card sponsorship, where an employer submits an application to the Department of Labor for an employee’s permanent residency. OpenAI did not advertise positions it sought to fill through the PERM program on its external job website. OpenAI also required applicants to mail paper applications for positions advertised as part of PERM recruitment, even though the company permitted electronic applications for other positions. In addition, OpenAI took other steps to discourage US workers from applying, such as advertising positions on the radio late at night.