Reuters: 15% of Facebook Employees on H-1B Visas

Reuters has found that more than 15 percent of Facebook’s U.S. staff are immigrants employed through H-1B temporary work visas.

Based on a review of U.S. Labor Department filings for 2016 regarding temporary visa programs, Reuters found 3,339 workers of approximately 22,000 Facebook employees working in the U.S. were employed directly through H-1B temporary visas.

At over 15 percent, Facebook had the highest percentage of H-1B contractors of any U.S. tech operating company.

Breitbart News has reported that although there are only new 85,000 H-1B temporary visas granted by the U.S. State Department each year, there are about 650,000 H-1Bs working in the American private sector, roughly 100,000 H-1Bs employed at U.S. universities, and an unknown number of H-1B spouses issued green card work permits.

The Reuters report came in the same week that the White House released its “Buy American and Hire American” initiative aimed launching a review of trade deals and immigration policies negotiated by his predecessors that the President claims unfairly disadvantage American corporate competitiveness and hurt U.S. worker wages.

The H-1B program was originally designed to import extraordinarily brilliant and talented foreigners, like the next Albert Einstein, to conduct research and development projects at U.S. technology companies and universities, temporarily.

But the White House stated, citing congressional studies, that 80 percent of the approved H-1B applications were for the two lowest wage levels allowed, indicating that companies routinely abuse the H-1B visa program to replace American workers with lower paid foreign workers.

Breitbart News has reported numerous examples of U.S. tech workers being replaced by India-based contractors importing H-1B temporary visa labor at about 60 percent of the cost of hiring an American tech worker.

Once the H-1B contractors learn job duties, the U.S. jobs can be permanently offshored at about a 75 percent savings, according to a February 2017 San Francisco Business Times review of the role of H-1B’s in outsourcing Pacific Gas and Electric jobs to India.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg began funding FWD.US in 2013, which allied with other business groups to lobby for expanded rules to allow U.S. companies to hire more cheap foreign white-collar professionals — such as H-1B contract workers — instead of American graduates. But the push for “comprehensive immigration reform” failed during the Obama administration after the Democrats lost 9 Senate and 13 House seats in the 2014 elections.

Facebook only ranked as the fifth-largest user of H-1B foreign temporary workers in 2016 in absolute terms — behind the 23,028 at Apple, 9,620 at IBM, 9,589 at Microsoft, and 7,649 at Amazon. Even those numbers may be understated, because they do not include any of the 180,000 H-1Bs tech companies rent from the major big tech labor contractors, including Cognizant, Wipro, Infosys and Tata.