Meta, the company that used to be called Facebook, has allowed at least one department to be run by Chinese migrants, according to a former employee who says the company allows discrimination against Americans.
“At Meta, 90% of my coworkers were Chinese, and non-Chinese were routinely excluded, disadvantaged, and targeted for layoffs,” said Jeremy Bernier, who was recently fired from a software engineering job at Meta. He added:
6 out of the 7 layoffs I observed targeted non-Chinese despite non-Chinese being the vast minority. Certain org[anizations] like ads and MRS [Meta Recommendation Systems for prioritizing Facebook posts] are notorious for being Chinese dominated.
“On Wednesdays and Fridays I’d often be the only non-Chinese person on my team in the office, and they’d all get lunch together without inviting me,” Bernier said in a series of posts about his experience with the company.
“I think Americans would be outraged if they knew that their own citizens were getting marginalized and laid off at their own companies, while Chinese promote themselves up, conquer entire orgs, and reap millions [in pay and bonuses],” said Bernier, who is a 2012 graduate of Virginia Tech.
“Americans are practically non-existent in the most coveted, high paying tech jobs in the world at American companies in America,” he said on May 30, echoing 2025 comments by Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen.
On May 29, he said:
Anybody who is multicultural or has lived in other countries knows that cultural differences are 100% real. I knew all of this having spent 5 years living abroad across 50+ countries prior to my previous job in Big Tech working in a 90%+ foreign team, but I still underestimated it, and that only disadvantaged me. I erroneously assumed others shared the same values as me as had been the case at my previous companies.
Many of the comments corroborated and validated Bernier’s criticism of ethnic enclaves in U.S. companies. Other comments praised Chinese managers and slammed other ethnic groups. There have been many more reports about discrimination, embezzlement, and incompetence within Indian enclaves in U.S. companies.
Vice President JD Vance and other administration officials have criticized the visa-worker programs that pipeline many Chinese and Indians workers into Fortune 500 companies. But the programs are strongly defended by Silicon Valley investors and Wall Street billionaires because they dramatically inflate companies’ stock values by cutting payroll costs.
Wall Street-appointed boards and CEOs at many companies encourage the ethnic enclaves that quietly suppress product quality, innovation, professionalism, and dynamism within each company and the industry, responded Kevin Lynn, founder of the U.S. TechWorkers:
Tribalism is a [C-Suite] tool that tamps down potential [internal executive] competitors because it changes incentives. If you’re either leading a tribe or you’re part of a tribe, you know you’re secure. Your position isn’t merit-based — it’s based on your race, your ethnicity, who you’re friends with, family, that kind of thing.
This complacency is easier for large companies with monopoly-like dominance that can meet investors’ demands for profits in the next quarter, said Lynn, whose group rallies technology professionals to lobby against the H-1B and other visa programs that allow foreign professionals to replace Americans in the U.S. white-collar sector.
“Innovation, inventiveness, novel ideas take a backseat to tribalism,” which gradually excludes and discards inventive, innovative Americans, Lynn said, adding:
When 40 percent or more of your coworkers are from another country, from another culture, and prefer to speak another language, there’s not going to be any trust, any ability to bond to build something [innovative]. So the [C-Suite] wins. Companies like BlackRock and Vanguard will [continue to] buy their securities; they’ll get their earnings per share …without any potential green shoots that could flower into [an internal or external] competitor.
“If you’re working six days a week, nine-plus hours a day, plus your commute, you’re not going to have time, if you’re an American, to work on building the better mousetrap,” he added.
In 2021, Facebook quietly paid a token $14 million fine amid massive evidence of discrimination against American job seekers. The discrimination was made possible and profitable by the many visa programs that allow executives to freely hire foreign workers.
The programs include the H-1B, L-1, H4EAD, J-1, TN, O-1, and Optional Practical Training programs, which keep perhaps 2.5 million foreign graduates in U.S -based jobs.
Similar corporate discrimination nationwide has dramatically spiked the unemployment and underemployment rate for American college graduates. The Wall Street Journal reported on May 22:
The college class of 2026 is entering one of the most nerve-racking job markets in recent memory. Employers have sharply reduced hiring—awful news for those trying to land their first job. Worries that artificial intelligence will be able to perform many of the skills graduates spent years honing are running high.
Meta declined to comment on the Bernier charges.
Americans need solidarity, new politicians, and lawyers if they want to overcome the tribalism that chokes their professional careers and the long-term competitiveness of their nation’s economy, Lynn said, adding:
Americans need to be actively engaged in talking to their elected representatives. There’s no excuse at this point to have in Seattle or in Silicon Valley any elected politician who isn’t putting the interest of American tech workers first.
If there isn’t a good candidate to give your vote to, find others behind them. Use your influence on social media, not to make snarky comments, not to tell people what they already know, but to actually drive grassroots activism … [If] you can demonstrate that you can take a politician out of office [or] you can either put them in office … they have your attention,
New lawsuits against company-hosted ethnic enclaves might help in the long run, he added: “That would be a novel and worthwhile lawsuit if you can get … a shareholder that owns 0.5 percent point of the company to sue them on this … [for] working against the long-term interest of the company.”
Bernier’s Account
Bernier used several posts to describe the mixture of attitudes and incentives within his Chinese enclave at Meta.
“Just to be clear, most Chinese are very kind so don’t take this as an attack,” Bernier wrote, adding:
Meta was easily the most toxic company I’ve worked for. There’s a reason the Chinese call it “Squid Game”. Others refer to it as “Hunger Games” or “Lord of the Flies”. I think they’re all accurate.
The company culture is basically every man/woman for themselves. The performance review process (PSC) not only doesn’t incentivize helping others, if anything it actually discourages it since everyone is stack ranked [compared] against each other. Imagine working on a team where every 6 months, one of you is going to get axed. Of course it’s going to become toxic …
The only mission bonding the company together is individual self-preservation. Save your own ass to survive for another stock vesting, and throw someone else under the bus if you need to.
“I had the most toxic manager of my life here. I watched him deliberately set up a new hire to fail, driving them to needing to see a psychiatrist for anxiety + depression, and getting them fired,” he said.
“I managed to transfer out of my first team into a new team with a great manager where everyone was very smart, supportive, and hardworking,” Bernier added.
“The org[anization] I was in (Facebook ads) is 90% Chinese, and the entire leadership chain up to the VP level is Chinese,” Bernier wrote in a May 21 post on X, adding:
Mandarin is the primary language at the office, except in official meetings with non-speakers. Chinese work culture is very different from American work culture, with 996 (9am-9pm, 6 days/week), top-down nature, emphasis on saving face (eg. don’t question your superiors), and toxicity being quite common.
China’s culture excludes Americans’ free-speaking professionalism, Bernier said:
When 90% of an org and the entire leadership chain is dominated by one ethnicity, naturally their work culture is going to spill through. Chinese culture is completely different from American work culture, and learning to navigate that was a huge obstacle for me. For example I’m the type that tends to question everything and isn’t afraid to challenge a “superior”, but I quickly realized that my TL seemed to take offense to that, and would punish/retaliate me for it.
In a separate post, he said:
I actually tried to escalate [the issue] to HR – they don’t give a shit. Their job is to protect the company from lawsuits, not provide “justice”. Unless you have documented evidence of something truly egregious that would put the company at legal risk, nothing will happen. If anything it just puts you at greater risk for getting fired since you’ll probably be retaliated against (remember, the TLs [Team Leaders] have the power here, followed by managers).
In 202o, the Project Veritas investigation group released an internal Facebook document that showed the company directing the hiring department to favor foreign workers. “When hiring for HR positions, it’s important to prioritize H-1B visa workers, and this will stimulate the process of diversification of the workplace,” says the March 2020 document titled “Diversity Initiative.”
“One of the fatal flaws of western culture is that people are so afraid of being perceived as racist/sexist/prejudiced that they’re unable to speak honestly about differences in culture, gender, religion, even politics,” Bernier posted May 29. “The result is that westerners are more ignorant of these topics, more likely to believe nonsense like thinking that cultural and gender differences aren’t real, and more likely to be taken advantage of.”
Bernier did not mention the security issues raised by foreign nationals having access to the companies’ intellectual property or the personal data of many millions of Americans.
“Westerners are either too scared to touch this topic, or don’t care about other westerners, especially westerners in high paying industries like tech,” he posted on May 30. Many — not all — “Americans would rather let their own people suffer than risk sounding racist.”
“To end on an optimistic note, the pendulum has been swinging in the right direction,” he said on May 29. “I’m optimistic … but there’s still a long way to go. I don’t know what the solution is other than leaders boldly opening dialogue and steering the culture.”
But the enclave culture will be difficult to fix, he said, “to be honest, I don’t have faith that much would change so long as the entire leadership chain up to the VP level is dominated by the same [Chinese] ethnicity, language, and culture.”
“Nor does it seem that leadership even remotely cares given that this has been happening in the HQ for probably at least the last decade, and is obvious to anyone who’s stepped foot in the office,” he added.