| The Labor Department is investigating the nation’s largest immigration law firm for potentially improperly advising U.S. corporations on disqualifying American job applicants in the process of securing certification for green cards.
The department says that the New York law firm of Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy, whose clients include General Electric, IBM, Cisco, and Intel, may have improperly advised clients to contact a Fragomen attorney before hiring “apparently qualified” U.S. workers.
The department is auditing the company’s applications on behalf of thousands of immigrants for permanent foreign labor certification, or PERM, which is used to sponsor workers for green cards. The process requires a company to advertise and seek to find qualified U.S. workers for the job. A company may fill a position with a foreigner only if it is unable to recruit a U.S. citizen. Fragomen is the largest law firm handling PERM cases, filing 3,600 labor certifications in 2004, twice the number of the next largest company, the vast majority from Indian citizens. |
