Dive Brief:

  • Meta Platforms Inc. allegedly terminated a manager who declined to sign an immigration reference letter he believed contained inaccuracies, according to a lawsuit filed Monday in a New Jersey federal district court.
  • The letter was intended to support an I-140 EB-2 National Interest Waiver petition for a product designer at the company but “materially overstated” the worker’s actual role, the complaint alleged. The manager revised the letter to include only statements he “could truthfully endorse.”
  • He alleged retaliation under Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination, among other claims, after being later terminated despite lacking a “documented performance deficiency that explained or justified his termination.” Meta did not respond to a request for comment.

Dive Insight:

Generally, an employer can file an EB-2 petition after securing a labor certification from the U.S. Department of Labor, per U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. “USCIS, however, can waive the requirement of a job offer, and thus, the labor certification if it is in the interest of the United States,” the agency said.

In this case, Meta’s outside immigration counsel allegedly attributed $638 million in incremental advertising revenue to the worker, said the worker had created algorithms or artificial intelligence tools, and stated the worker was of national importance to the U.S. in the proposed reference letter.

The manager “did not possess a factual or professional basis to attest that [the worker]’s work served national security or that the United States government had adopted a position concerning [the worker]’s particular work,” according to court documents.

The manager’s “refusal was based on his objectively reasonable and good-faith belief that he should not submit materially inaccurate statements to USCIS or lend his professional credentials to unsupported assertions in an immigration proceeding,” per the complaint. After the plaintiff’s refusal to sign, his direct manager signed off on a reference letter instead.

The plaintiff also challenged “Meta’s selective use of its company-coordinated immigration-support process for selected Chinese-national employees.” The company “used immigration support as an employment-related benefit” and “its selection and allocation were not governed by neutral, consistently applied criteria unrelated to national origin, ancestry, race, or ethnic identity,” the complaint alleged.

A few months after his refusal to sign the letter, Meta fired the manager. The termination documents for the manager “did not identify underperformance as the reason for termination,” per the complaint. “Meta later advanced an oral underperformance explanation that Plaintiff contends was pretextual.”