US official said they have suspended the Green Card filings of Cognizant and Cloudera.
Department of Labor’s Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito announced the action on social media and also spoke about their investigation preceding the action on Texas journalist Sara Gonzales’s show. No details have been revealed yet and D’Esposito’s social media posts led to some confusion as he mentioned PERM filings and H-1B processings both which are very different from each other.
Calling it a huge deal, D’Esposito said American people will finally see that “we are for real”. Thousands of foreign technology workers hoping to secure US Green Cards through employer sponsorship are facing fresh uncertainty after the US Department of Labor suspended PERM filings by IT services giant Cognizant and software company Cloudera amid an investigation into alleged fraud and misuse of employment-based visa programmes. There has been no official USCIS or DOL announcement to this effect.
PERM is the Department of Labor’s labour-certification process through which an employer generally has to demonstrate that there are no qualified and available US workers for a particular job and that employing a foreign worker will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of similarly employed US workers.