What It Costs to Be Told You Are Worth Less Than Your Visa Status

Purushothaman Rajaram came to this country, went through the years-long bureaucratic process of naturalization, became a citizen, built a career in information technology, and then applied for a job at one of the most powerful corporations on the planet. He did this multiple times, across two years, between 2020 and 2022. Each time, he was turned away.

He was not turned away because he lacked qualifications. The lawsuit does not allege that. He was turned away, he alleges, because Meta looked at him and saw the wrong kind of worker: a citizen who would have to be paid a market wage. The H-1B workers Meta allegedly preferred were legally bound to their sponsoring employer in ways that gave the company leverage over their pay and working conditions that it would never have over a citizen. That leverage has a dollar value. Rajaram’s citizenship was, in this framing, a liability on Meta’s spreadsheet.

Think about what that means for a moment, concretely. You complete the process of becoming an American. You study for a test on a country’s history and laws. You raise your hand. You swear an oath. You get a certificate. You are told, formally and officially, that you now have the full rights of citizenship. Then you apply for a job, and a trillion-dollar corporation quietly decides that the paperwork you earned is an obstacle to their quarterly margins.

Rajaram filed a class action, which means he believes this did not happen only to him. It happened to a class of people, a category of workers who share the characteristic of being U.S. citizens. The lawsuit frames this as a systemic hiring policy, not a single manager’s bad decision. If that allegation is proven true, Meta ran a filter across its entire hiring pipeline that made citizenship a disqualifier, not a credential.

The people caught in that filter are not an abstraction. They are workers, many of them immigrants who spent years earning the right to be called citizens, who then competed in good faith for jobs and lost to a structural preference they never knew existed. They updated their resumes. They prepared for interviews. Some of them probably got to the final round. The rejection emails they received said nothing about citizenship. Corporate rejection emails never do.

The court record does not tell us how many people are in that class. It does not tell us how many jobs they lost, how many months they spent unemployed or underemployed after being turned away, or what that financial pressure did to their families. The lawsuit is still at the early stage. What it does tell us is that a federal appeals court, after reading Meta’s legal arguments, found them unpersuasive enough to send the case back for trial. Someone has to answer for this in court. That process is now underway.

A trillion-dollar corporation quietly decided that the citizenship you earned was an obstacle to their quarterly margins.

Verbatim: What the Court Documents Actually Say

The following quotes are pulled directly from the published opinion of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Case No. 22-16870, filed June 27, 2024. Nothing is paraphrased. These are the official words of the federal judicial record.

“Purushothaman Rajaram is a naturalized United States citizen and an information technology professional with experience managing software development projects. On several occasions between 2020 and 2022, he unsuccessfully applied to work at Meta Platforms, Inc., which operates Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, among other online services. He alleges that Meta refused to hire him because it prefers to hire noncitizens holding H-1B visas to whom it can pay lower wages.” Opinion by Judge Miller, Rajaram v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 22-16870 (9th Cir. 2024)

• This is the court’s own summary of the plaintiff’s core allegation. The phrase “to whom it can pay lower wages” is the court’s language, drawn from the complaint. It establishes that the alleged motive is financial: H-1B workers cost less.
• The court names Meta’s three flagship consumer products, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, placing this case squarely within the operations of the world’s largest social media company, not a fly-by-night contractor.

“An employer that discriminates against United States citizens gives one class of people—noncitizens, or perhaps some subset of noncitizens—a greater right to make contracts than ‘white citizens.’ If some noncitizens have a greater right to make contracts than ‘white citizens,’ then it is not true that ‘[a]ll persons’ have the ‘same right’ to make contracts as ‘white citizens.’ That is precisely what the literal text of the statute prohibits.” Opinion by Judge Miller, Rajaram v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 22-16870 (9th Cir. 2024)

• This is the majority’s central legal finding. The court is saying that if Meta’s hiring preference for H-1B workers is real, it creates a two-tier system in which noncitizens have a superior right to enter into employment contracts than citizens do. That is exactly what a Reconstruction-era civil rights statute was written to prevent.
• The court deliberately uses the word “literal,” signaling that it read the statute at face value and found it covers this case. Meta asked the court to read the text as something more flexible. The court refused.

“The problem with Meta’s position is that ‘the same’ means ‘the same.’ It does not mean ‘at least as great as.’ Meta does not suggest that ‘the same’ meant something different when the statute was enacted, nor does it provide ‘contextual evidence that Congress intended to depart from the ordinary meaning’ of that phrase.” Opinion by Judge Miller, Rajaram v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 22-16870 (9th Cir. 2024)

• Meta’s lawyers at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher tried to argue the statute only sets a floor for rights, not a ceiling, meaning employers could give noncitizens better treatment than citizens without violating the law. The court called this out directly: “the same” is not the same as “at least as much.”
• The court noted Meta produced no historical evidence that the phrase meant something different when it was written. This is significant because it removes Meta’s best escape route: arguing the words had a specialized historical meaning. They did not, and Meta could not prove otherwise.

“Illegal border crossings have increased year over year since 2021, with almost two million encounters reported during the first half of this fiscal year alone. Given that it is easier to pay such noncitizens lower wages, it’s easy enough to see how this creates growing economic pressure to favor noncitizens over citizens. A statute that protects against this sort of discrimination may be what this country needs, but it isn’t what Congress gave us in Section 1981.” Dissent by Judge VanDyke, Rajaram v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 22-16870 (9th Cir. 2024)

• This is the dissenting judge writing in his own voice. He is acknowledging, on the federal judicial record, that the economic incentive to discriminate against citizens is real and growing. His phrase “growing economic pressure” is a judicial admission that the corporate motive alleged in this case is not paranoid or speculative.
• The dissenter also admits, plainly: a law protecting against this “may be what this country needs.” He voted against Rajaram on statutory interpretation grounds, not because he thought the discrimination was acceptable. That distinction matters for understanding the limits of what courts can fix without congressional action.
• This passage also illustrates an uncomfortable irony: the judge references border crossing data in a paragraph about corporate wage arbitrage, conflating undocumented immigration with the legal H-1B program. The H-1B program is a congressional program used by Fortune 500 companies, not a border phenomenon. The confusion in this framing is worth naming.

“This is not an easy interpretive case, and I personally like the majority’s conclusion better than mine… I therefore reluctantly dissent.” Dissent by Judge VanDyke, Rajaram v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 22-16870 (9th Cir. 2024)

• A sitting federal appeals judge is publicly stating that the outcome he voted for is not the outcome he personally believes is just. This is rare candor. It reflects a legal system that can produce formally correct rulings that are substantively unjust, and a judge honest enough to say so in writing.
• The word “reluctantly” carries weight in a judicial opinion. It signals that the dissenter is not defending Meta or the practice of citizenship discrimination. He is dissenting on the narrow question of whether this particular statute covers this particular harm. That gap between moral judgment and legal outcome is precisely where corporate exploitation tends to live.

The H-1B Program: Built for Scarcity, Used for Savings

To understand what Meta is accused of, you need to understand how the H-1B program is designed to work, and why a company would want to exploit the gap between the design and the practice.

• The H-1B visa program, governed by 8 C.F.R. § 214.2(h)(1)(ii)(B), legally allows U.S. employers to hire foreign workers for “specialty occupations” when there is a documented shortage of skilled American workers authorized to work in the United States. The key requirement is that shortage: companies are not supposed to use H-1B slots when qualified Americans are available and willing to take the job.
• H-1B workers are tied to a specific sponsoring employer for the duration of their visa status. If that employer terminates them or they quit, they generally must find a new sponsoring employer quickly or face deportation. This dependency gives the sponsoring company structural leverage over pay negotiations, overtime requests, and working conditions that would not exist with a citizen employee who can simply leave for a competitor.
• The prevailing wage rule requires H-1B employers to pay at or above the median for the role. In practice, critics and researchers have documented that prevailing wage determinations can be set at the low end of wage ranges and do not account for the full compensation packages, equity grants, and negotiating power that a competitive market for citizen workers would produce. The structural result is that H-1B workers, despite formal legal protections, often cost less in total because they have less bargaining power.
• The allegation against Meta is that it used this program not to fill a genuine shortage but as a deliberate cost-suppression strategy: identifying roles for which U.S. citizen applicants existed and were qualified, and systematically preferring H-1B candidates instead to maintain a workforce with structurally lower wage leverage.
• Meta’s legal defense did not dispute the mechanics of the H-1B program. Its lawyers at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP argued instead that the civil rights statute Rajaram used to sue simply does not cover citizenship discrimination as a legal category. That is a narrower, more technical defense: even if the discrimination happened, this is not the right law to stop it.

Who Gets Hurt When Hiring Is Rigged

Public Health and Worker Wellbeing

The consequences of a systemic preference for visa-dependent workers over citizens extend beyond any single rejected job application. They accumulate across a workforce and a society.

• Unemployed or underemployed workers face well-documented health consequences: elevated rates of depression, anxiety, cardiovascular disease, and reduced life expectancy. When citizens are systematically excluded from high-paying tech jobs, those consequences scale across a class of workers who cannot access the wages, benefits, or employer-sponsored health insurance that those jobs provide.
• H-1B workers themselves, despite being the alleged preferred hires, are harmed by the arrangement. Their immigration status creates documented psychological stress: fear of job loss, inability to advocate for better conditions, and heightened vulnerability to workplace abuse. Structurally dependent workers are workers with no safety net and no voice, and that condition has measurable mental health costs.
• The tech industry’s dominance in setting compensation benchmarks means wage suppression at companies like Meta does not stay inside Meta. When the largest employer in a sector artificially deflates wages through visa arbitrage, it reshapes what “market rate” means for everyone in that sector, including at companies that do not run the same scheme.

Economic Inequality

The economic architecture of this alleged practice concentrates the benefits of Big Tech growth in the hands of corporate shareholders while shifting the costs onto workers who were legally entitled to compete for those jobs.

• Meta reported revenue of over $134 billion in 2023. The labor cost savings generated by preferring lower-wage visa workers over higher-wage citizen workers do not disappear: they convert directly into margins, executive compensation, and shareholder returns. The workers who were excluded from those jobs received none of that value.
• Naturalized citizens like Rajaram, who spent years and significant money on the immigration and naturalization process in the expectation that citizenship would open labor market doors, are directly defrauded of the economic value of that investment if corporations maintain a preference for non-citizen labor regardless of qualifications.
• The circuit split created by this ruling means the legal protection against citizenship hiring discrimination is geographically uneven. A U.S. citizen rejected from a tech job in California now has a potential legal remedy under the Ninth Circuit’s ruling. The same citizen rejected for the same job in Texas, under the Fifth Circuit’s 1986 precedent, does not. That geographic inequality in civil rights protection is itself an economic harm.
• Class-action status, if granted as the lawsuit proceeds, would aggregate individual economic injuries into a collective claim. Each class member represents wages not earned, benefits not received, and career trajectories altered by an alleged corporate policy. The aggregate economic harm to that class could be substantial, though no damages figure has been adjudicated yet.

Two Federal Courts, Two Answers: The Circuit Split That Leaves You Unprotected Depending on Your Zip Code

The Ninth Circuit’s ruling directly contradicts a 1986 Fifth Circuit decision in the case of Chaiffetz v. Robertson Research Holding, Ltd. The result is that a fundamental civil rights protection is now legally inconsistent across the United States.

• In Chaiffetz v. Robertson Research Holding, Ltd., 798 F.2d 731 (5th Cir. 1986), the Fifth Circuit ruled that Section 1981 does not cover discrimination based on citizenship. An American employee of a British company who alleged he was passed over for promotion because of his citizenship lost that claim entirely. The Fifth Circuit said: “Discrimination against whites is racial discrimination, but (in America) discrimination against Americans can never be discrimination based on alienage.”
• The Ninth Circuit in Rajaram explicitly disagrees: “Discrimination based on alienage is indeed different from racial discrimination, but it is not different in any way that is relevant to the text of section 1981.” The court found the Fifth Circuit’s reasoning flawed at its foundation.
• The practical result: a U.S. citizen tech worker who believes they were rejected from a job at a company headquartered in California can now bring a federal civil rights claim under the Ninth Circuit’s ruling. The same worker making the same claim against a company headquartered in Texas faces the Fifth Circuit’s older precedent and will likely lose at the threshold.
• Circuit splits of this kind are typically resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court, which can take up the question and issue a binding national ruling. As of the filing date of this opinion, the Supreme Court had not agreed to hear this case. Until it does, or until Congress acts, the legal landscape remains fractured along geographic lines.
• The dissenting judge, VanDyke, explicitly named this problem: “The majority unnecessarily creates a circuit split where one should not exist.” His objection was procedural as much as substantive: he believed the Ninth Circuit should have deferred to the Fifth Circuit’s existing interpretation rather than creating a conflict requiring Supreme Court resolution.

The legal protection available to a U.S. citizen who faces hiring discrimination depends entirely on which state they live in. That is the current state of federal civil rights law.

The Arithmetic of Wage Arbitrage

What You Can Do and Who Needs to Hear From You

The case is remanded back to the Northern District of California. The fight is not over, and there are multiple pressure points where organized public attention changes outcomes.

Key Decision-Makers in This Case

• Meta Platforms, Inc. Leadership: The company has not settled, has not changed its hiring practices publicly, and has not acknowledged wrongdoing. Its legal team at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP will continue fighting this in the lower court. The people who set Meta’s workforce strategy hold these decisions.
• U.S. Congress: The dissenting judge said plainly that a law explicitly protecting citizens from this type of discrimination “may be what this country needs” but Congress has not written it. No bill number is available in the source material. That gap is a congressional failure, not a legal inevitability.
• The Supreme Court: The circuit split created by this ruling will eventually require Supreme Court resolution. Public pressure on the court’s docket, through legal advocacy organizations, matters.

Watchlist: Regulatory Bodies With Jurisdiction

• Department of Labor (DOL) Wage and Hour Division: The DOL administers and enforces prevailing wage requirements for the H-1B program. Complaints about employers using H-1B workers at below-prevailing wages can be filed at dol.gov.
• U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS): USCIS administers H-1B visa petitions and has authority to investigate program fraud and abuse, including employers who falsely certify a shortage of qualified American workers to justify H-1B filings.
• Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC): The EEOC enforces federal employment discrimination law. While its current framework for citizenship discrimination is still being defined, it remains the primary intake agency for federal hiring discrimination complaints.
• Department of Justice Civil Rights Division: The DOJ’s Immigrant and Employee Rights Section enforces the anti-discrimination provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act, including prohibitions on discrimination based on citizenship status in hiring. Its jurisdiction and the Section 1981 claim in this case can operate in parallel.
• Congress, House and Senate Judiciary Committees: These committees have oversight of both immigration law and civil rights statutes. The legislative fix to the ambiguity exposed by this case runs through them.

Resistance: Mutual Aid and Organizing

• If you are an IT or tech worker who applied to Meta or another major tech company and believe your citizenship was a factor in a rejection between 2020 and 2024, document everything: application dates, rejection notices, job titles, and any communications. This case is a class action. Evidence of class membership matters.
• Contact the plaintiff’s legal team at Kotchen & Low LLP in Washington, D.C. (listed in the court record) if you believe you are a member of the class Rajaram is trying to represent. Class actions gain strength from member participation.
• Connect with tech worker unions and labor organizing groups in your sector. The Communications Workers of America (CWA) and other tech-sector unions have been active on H-1B reform issues and can provide resources, legal referrals, and collective political pressure that no individual worker can generate alone.
• Push your representatives to close the legislative gap. Write, call, and show up to town halls asking your member of Congress why there is no explicit federal statute protecting U.S. citizens from citizenship-based hiring discrimination. The dissenting judge in this case asked the same question in his published opinion. Your representative should have an answer.
• Amplify this case in communities of naturalized citizens. The plaintiff is a naturalized American. Many people in that community applied for citizenship partly on the expectation that it would improve their labor market position. This case is about them. Their organizing voice in this fight is legitimate and powerful.