A federal magistrate in California accepted Facebook’s legal defense against a lawsuit that claimed company recruiters discriminated against an American citizen.
“This is a putative class action against Meta Platforms (known as Facebook until June 2022),” the San Francisco magistrate’s decision dismissing the lawsuit said. She added:
The named plaintiff Purushothaman Rajaram is a naturalized U.S. citizen who applied for different jobs at Facebook in Menlo Park, California, and Austin, Texas, but was not hired, allegedly because Facebook hires [foreign workers with] H-1B visa holders because it can pay them less than U.S. citizens.
Meta/Facebook defeated the lawsuit by arguing that the particular discrimination law cited in the case does not protect U.S. citizens from corporate policies that favor the hiring of foreign workers via the many visa worker programs:
Facebook moved to dismiss the claim for failure to state a claim under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6), on the grounds that U.S. citizens are not a protected class under [42 U.S.C.] § 1981 and the plaintiff did not plausibly allege intentional discrimination or that he would have been hired but for discrimination.
The court grants the motion. The weight of authority supports the conclusion that a U.S. citizen cannot bring a claim for citizenship or alienage discrimination under § 1981.
“I’m amazed that wouldn’t simply be presumed” in any reading of the § 1981 law, responded Ken Cuccinelli, a lawyer and a former top official in former President Donald Trump’s Homeland Security agency.
Corporations do discriminate against Americans when hiring cheap and legally powerless visa workers, he told Breitbart News, adding:
It would seem to me presumptive by the use of the word “citizen” in the statute that citizenship is an underlying assumption. … That would automatically mean that citizens qua citizens, as citizens, do [get protection]. It is nearly unimaginable otherwise
The relevant 42 U.S.C. § 1981 law in the new lawsuit says:
(a) Statement of equal rights
All persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall have the same right in every State and Territory to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, give evidence, and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property as is enjoyed by white citizens, and shall be subject to like punishment, pains, penalties, taxes, licenses, and exactions of every kind, and to no other.
Meta did not respond to questions from Breitbart News.
The lawsuit was filed by Daniel Kotchen’s law firm, Kotchen & Low LLP. The firm represents many citizens and visa workers who are sidelined or disfavored by Fortune 500 companies. The companies have been fiercely defended by expensive lawyers, so it makes sense for Kotchen to experiment with many legal strategies in many cases in many jurisdictions.
Kotchen declined to comment to Breitbart News about the next step in the lawsuit.
The judge noted that Facebook has already been dinged for prior discrimination against Americans under a different discrimination law, dubbed 8 U.S.C. § 1324b:
The plaintiff cites a December 2020 administrative proceeding under 8 U.S.C. § 1324b brought by the U.S. Department of Justice — following an investigation — against Facebook for intentionally discriminating against U.S. workers “because of their citizenship or immigration status by failing to recruit, consider, or hire [them] for permanent positions that it earmarks for the company’s visa holders.”
“The parties settled the case: Facebook did not admit liability, paid a civil penalty of $4.75 million, paid $9.5 million into a settlement fund for potential victims, and agreed to change its recruitment process,” the judge said.
Breitbart News covered the case of Facebook settling the many discrimination claims for a pittance.
In this case, the judge’s decision focuses on the courtroom arguments.
That focus excludes nonlegal issues, such as the scale of the damage to Americans who lose careers and wealth amid the flooded labor market.
The labor inflow has forced down Americans’ wages. It has also boosted rents and housing prices, and it has reduced native-born Americans’ clout in local and national elections. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of fields.
White-collar Americans are forced to compete against roughly 1.5 million foreign contract workers. These H-1B, J-1, H4EAD, L-1, and OPT workers hold a wide variety of white-collar jobs throughout the United States. Many accept far lower wages than needed by Americans in the hope of winning the huge deferred bonus of U.S. citizenship.
The enormous number of visa workers in the United States has changed the labor market. For example, visa workers have told Breitbart News that cliques of visa workers, H.R staffers, and managers buy and sell Americans’ jobs in exchange for covert kickbacks. This workplace cronyism pushes U.S.-style professionalism — and many U.S. professionals — out of worksites and gives free rein to U.S. executives.
In 2012, “my manager told me to clear [software] errors from an error-logging system manually and not look at the underlying errors [created by H-1B visa workers],” Max from Philadelphia, a skilled U.S. professional, told Breitbart News. He continued:
The errors were being produced faster than they could be cleared manually. So day after day, the number of errors logged in this logging system would grow larger and larger and larger. I told the guy, I said, “You know, do you want me to look at the source of these errors and figure out what’s wrong?” He says, “No, I just want you to clear the errors.”
I lost my temper. I literally told him “Did you want me to chew that shit before I swallow it? Or do you just want me to swallow it whole?” That got me fired.
The manager, another white guy just a little bit older than me, said, “Well, [Max], they got you,” He smiled and said, “You know, it’s all a [management strategy] game. We were gonna get you one way or the other.”
He said, “You know, we work people, we don’t give them any more money, and we treat them like shit, and eventually they’ll either quit or they’ll lose their temper and they’ll get fired like you did … Don’t take it personally, this is the way we get rid of people.”
“They were flushing Americans out of the office,” Max said, adding, “I basically became an alcoholic” for three years.
Establishment media outlets hide this massive displacement of U.S. graduates.
“Free labor is a fact of academic life,” the New York Times reported in an April 2022 article about universities’ exploitation of the flooded labor market. But the article did not mention why the labor market is flooded:
“These arrangements are common in academia,” Bill Kisliuk, a spokesman for U.C.L.A., told Inside Higher Ed when at first defending the job posting.
Contingent faculty, the umbrella term for all kinds of generally part-time and untenured college teachers without much if any job security, make up a huge portion of the teaching staff of universities — by some estimates, around 70 percent overall and more in community colleges.
They have long complained about the long hours and low pay. But these unpaid arrangements are perhaps the most concrete example of the unequal power in a weak labor market — in which hundreds of candidates might apply for one position. Institutions are able to persuade or cajole people who have invested at least five or six years in earning a Ph.D. to work for free, even though, academics said, these jobs rarely lead to a tenure-track position.
Advocates argue that the displacement is great for investors — even as it impoverishes millions of U.S. professionals.
In 2021, a corporate-backed think tank said President Donald Trump’s short-term freeze on the inflow of more H-1B workers denied $100 billion in stock wealth to investors.
Many polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration, but the polls also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into the jobs and homes needed by the families of blue-collar and white-collar Americans.
The November 10 decision, numbered 22-cv-02920-LB, was signed by Judge Laurel Beeler in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California.
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