The Trump Department of Justice has filed a federal lawsuit against Cloudera Inc., a major Silicon Valley tech company, for deliberately discriminating against qualified American workers in favor of foreign visa holders for high-paying tech positions.
The Civil Rights Division’s lawsuit accuses Cloudera of violating the Immigration and Nationality Act by creating a sham, separate hiring process designed to deter and exclude American citizens while fast-tracking foreign workers on temporary visas.
“Employers cannot use the PERM sponsorship process as a backdoor for discriminating against U.S. workers,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said. “The Division will not hesitate to sue companies who intentionally deter U.S. workers from applying to American jobs.”
According to the DOJ, Cloudera set up a dedicated email address for job applications that was deliberately configured not to accept emails from outside the company.
American workers who followed the company’s posted instructions received automatic bounce-back messages stating that their applications could not be processed.
The DOJ said in a press release:
The complaint alleges Cloudera intentionally created a separate recruitment and hiring process to deter U.S. workers from applying, and also did not consider them, for lucrative technology jobs that the company earmarked for people with temporary employment visas. Cloudera created an email account that did not allow external emails, but still instructed applicants to use that unworkable email address to apply for jobs. The Division received a charge of employment discrimination from one U.S. worker who tried to apply using the email account Cloudera set up, but received a bounce back notification. When sponsoring current employees under the permanent labor certification program (PERM), Cloudera purposely failed to recruit U.S. workers in good faith.
At the same time, Cloudera was actively sponsoring foreign workers for permanent residency through the Department of Labor’s PERM program, a process that legally requires employers to make a genuine good-faith effort to recruit and hire qualified American workers first.
Hellbound and Down 