A New Way to Find Hidden Jobs

A new site called Jobs.Now has come up with a way to find jobs for Americans in a market where U.S. citizens have been cut out of for decades. (See a post from its anonymous founder here.)

That Immigration Act of 1990 created the H-1B-to-green-card path to permanent residency. Work a few years under H-1B and bound to the employers, then the employer will get you a green card. The 1990 Act transformed green cards into a publicly provided fringe benefit for employers. 

When you do a flow analysis, there is no labor market test whatsoever for hiring an H-1B worker, but there is one for green cards. Under this flow, the employer has had a foreign worker in place for several years when it engages in the labor market test for a green card, where is must show there are no American workers available. This flow creates an incentive for employers to use bad faith when it comes to recruiting Americans.

The Department of Labor has regulations governing the minimum recruitment that must be done as part of this process. This includes running two Sunday advertisements in the local newspaper. Immigration lawyers actively game this process with the goal of “Run[ning] classified ads that do NOT find any qualified U.S. workers”, as shown in this video presentation by a law firm specializing in this process:

Our goal is NOT to find a qualified U.S. worker . . . . Our objective is to get a person a green card . . . . So certainly we are not going to try to find a place where applicants would be most numerous.

If the Department of Labor were serious about ensuring Americans are not available, it would have set up a central website where employers would be required to post jobs as part of the green card process. But if they did that, Americans would actually apply, so business and legal groups have fought that for decades.

Into that void comes Jobs.Now, which collects jobs from across the country that are posted as part of the green card process. Now Americans can find the hidden job market that has been deliberately hidden from them and apply for those jobs.

Jobs.Now could turn into a valuable tool for the large number of Americans, especially older or younger, who are unemployed and are looking for work.

The website is already causing concern for immigration lawyers:

If large numbers of Americans start applying for jobs at the green card phase, that blocks many H-1B workers from getting green cards. If H-1B workers start being unable to get green cards, it will be hard for employers to attract H-1B workers in the first place.