Above-The-Law Facebook Abetting Border Invasion
By Joe Guzzardi
Facebook, the tech giant famous for censoring posts that promote political views opposite to its perspective, recently admitted that its users are aiding and abetting illegal immigration.
Responding to a letter sent by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, Facebook acknowledged it allows online users to share information that advises how to immigrate illegally and, alternatively, how to hire human traffickers to smuggle aliens into the U.S., and then apply for asylum. Shocked by Facebook’s candid confession to helping aliens to criminally beat the system, Brnovich wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding that the Justice Department open a full investigation into Facebook to find a way to “stop its active encouragement and facilitation of illegal entry.”
Brnovich’s indignant letter continued: “Facebook’s policy of allowing posts promoting human smuggling and illegal entry into the U.S. to regularly reach its billions of users seriously undermines the rule of law. The company is a direct facilitator, and thus exacerbates, the catastrophe occurring at Arizona’s southern border.”
The odds that Garland will investigate Facebook are zero. Because Facebook has shown a blatant willingness to barefacedly break immigration laws, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, et al consider themselves above the law, and know that the feds won’t lift a finger to interfere with their agenda, no matter how brazen.
For example, in mid-October, DOJ caught the social media titan reserving jobs for and then hiring foreign-born H-1B visa workers. In December 2020, the Immigrant and Employee Rights Section (IER) in DOJ’s Civil Rights Division filed a complaint against Facebook with the Office of the Chief Administrative Hearing Officer. DOJ alleged that Facebook refused to recruit – and therefore could not hire – skilled U.S. tech workers. The investigation began in 2017 when then-President Donald Trump’s “Buy American and Hire American” Executive Order, mandating that American worker protections be prioritized, was in effect.
In its complaint, IER asserted that for positions it reserved for those temporary visa holders, no advertisement appeared on Facebook’s careers website, no online applications were accepted, and candidates had to physically submit snail mail applications – not email – to the company, an unusual procedure for a major corporation that rose to fame and fortune through the Internet.
But, in what the Center for Immigration Studies’ Andrew Arthur, a former Counsel on the House Judiciary Committee and a retired immigration judge, identified as “the crux” of the DOJ’s case, IER alleged that “even when U.S. workers do apply, Facebook will not consider them for the advertised positions,” but rather the company “fills these positions exclusively with temporary visa holders.” The DOJ concluded: “Simply put, Facebook reserves these positions for temporary visa holders.”
Facebook’s deliberate subversion of the H-1B’s original intent – to complement the domestic labor force when no other American employee can be found – denied qualified U.S. tech workers coveted white-collar jobs. Facebook deprived an estimated 2,600 U.S. workers a fair shot at professional jobs that, DOJ said in its filing, averaged an annual salary of $156,000.
Instead, Facebook hired workers who obtained H-1B and other overseas visas in 2018 and 2019. Despite Facebook’s egregious and illegal offense, it settled the DOJ lawsuit for a token, slap on the wrist $14 million. Kristen Clarke, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division’s head, concluded: “Facebook is not above the law.”
Clarke’s claims aside, to Facebook, whose 2020 earnings were $21.2 billion and whose available cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities were $61.95 billion as of December 31, 2020, $14 million is pocket change, a sum likely dismissed by the company’s chief executives as the cost of doing business.
Although the DOJ exposed Facebook’s bag of dirty, anti-American worker tricks, the H-1B program will continue without meaningful reform, at least during the current administration. Zuckerberg, his Forward.us lobbying arm, and other tech giants like Google, Twitter and Amazon are huge donors to the Democratic Party. In politics, nothing is truer than the old phrase, “Money talks.”
Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
Above-The-Law Facebook Abetting Border Invasion
Above-The-Law Facebook Abetting Border Invasion
Like this:
Like Loading...
