A green card is _not_ an employment based immigrant visa or even a visa at all - the H-1B is. A green card holder has permanent residency and can apply for largely any job a US citizen can. Further they are not required to leave the country on becoming unemployed.

The immigrant visa is usually a stepping stone to permanent residency via a green card though, and this lawsuit is absolutely related to that process - when applying for permanent residency (green card) on an H-1B, the employer must supposedly prove they couldn’t hire an American to do same job. This is usually called the “PERM process”.

There has always been a gray area as to what that standard means, I’ve seen different companies interpret it very differently. When we talk about employment based immigrant visas and Facebook, it is overwhelmingly the H-1B (the data on visas issued is public).

An H-1B is an employment-based non-immigrant visa; which is to say that it doesn't lead to a right to remain permanently in the U.S.

A green card (I-551) is indeed, not a visa, and I was speaking informally when I described it as such. It is a document that proves the holder is a permanent legal resident, which is an immigration status. The right to permanent legal residence is established through an immigrant visa, such as the EB visas for employment-based immigration.

If you are already in the U.S. on an H-1B visa, your employer will file an I-140 petition for (e.g.) an EB-1 visa. Once a visa is available (this is the long wait for Indian/Chinese applicants in many categories), you can then file a I-485 application for adjustment of status on the basis of the approved I-140 petition. Assuming the I-485 application is approved, then you will receive the I-551 "green card" as proof.

In short: yes, the story is exactly about employment-based immigrant visas.

It’s almost entirely about PERM interviews conducted by Facebook for their H-1B holders looking to adjust status, yes. My main issue is with your earlier statement that this has nothing to do with the H-1B, when it almost exclusively concerns H-1B visa holders at Facebook in practice.

It would equivalently apply to petitions for immigrant visas where applicants would be outside the U.S. and apply via consular processing. Or for employees on intracompany transferee L-1 visas.

The PERM process is specifically a prerequisite to an I-140 petition for immigrant visa. Anything assertion that Facebook was "defrauding the H-1B program" is completely spurious.

While you are of course entitled to your view, I would respectfully disagree. In practice the _vast_ majority of I-140s filed by Facebook are for their H-1B holders. To pretend their PERM recruitment process and their use of the H-1B is somehow totally unlinked is disingenuous at best.