A former manager is suing Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms for unfair dismissal after he refused to validate company claims that were intended to get a green card for a Chinese employee in 2024.
“This action arises from Meta Platforms, Inc.’s retaliation against Plaintiff James Tillinghast after he refused to sign a …letter containing factual assertions that he reasonably believed were materially inaccurate … that was intended to support an I-140 National Interest Waiver [green card] petition for [the Chinese] Meta employee,” says the August 17 lawsuit from Constantine Bardis, a lawyer in New Jersey.
The claimed beneficiary of the flawed submission was Shenxun Wang, who worked within Tillinghast’s unit. The lawsuit does not say if Wang held an H-1B visa, which is indicated by his LinkedIn profile.
Tillinghast is asking for a little over $1 million in damages, including $565,000 in lost pay and $490,000 in lost equity. He is also asking for punitive damages and a jury trial in New Jersey.
HRDive, a specialized outlet for hiring professionals, revealed the lawsuit on August 19. Breitbart News has asked Meta for its response to the alleged claims in the lawsuit, which have yet to be heard in a courtroom.
Ethnic hiring is endemic in the Fortune 500, say many American professionals.
The skew exists because the visa programs allow and encourage U.S.-based managers to quietly sell single jobs or blocs of jobs to their co-ethnics via a hidden market of favors, salary kickbacks, and subcontract payments, many American and Indian technology workers have told Breitbart News.
This black market for white-collar jobs ensures that many skilled Americans are quietly fired to help foreign-born managers — mostly Indians — sell the jobs to co-nationals. The cost of this corrupt practice is imposed on American professionals — but also on the shareholders, says experts such as Jay Palmer.
Trump’s deputies have begun investigating fraud in the white-collar job market. In July, Anthony D’Esposito, the Inspector General at the Department of Labor, told Breitbart News:
Without revealing too much of an investigation, I think that when complete, one of the things that will probably make the American people most angry… and will probably lead to the biggest change from lawmakers — they will probably bring oversight to this — [is] the fact that many of the individuals that you’re talking about that are selling these jobs, getting kickbacks. We will clearly outline and define their relationships with — whether it’s gangs [or] whether it is transnational criminal organizations.
Agency officials are also drafting new regulations to reduce fraud and to encourage the hiring of Americans.
The lawsuit comes as President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has begun sanctioning firms that skew their hiring process to favor migants over Americans.
On August 4, the Department of Justice fined OpenAI — one of the world’s leading AI companies — $3.2 million after it failed to advertise a job that it was using to help a visa worker win a green card that allows permanent residency and a path to citizenship.
“It is illegal to discriminate against U.S. workers by preferring temporary visa holders for jobs,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a press statement. “This substantial settlement ensures that OpenAI redresses harm and changes its recruitment practices so that U.S. workers receive a fair opportunity for highly sought-after technology positions.”
The job advertisements and the “fair opportunity” are a legal part of the “PERM Process” by which companies provide green cards to their foreign workers by publicly hiring them for a job.
Companies are supposed to advertise the jobs so that qualified Americans get the opportunity to apply for the jobs first. But companies and their immigration lawyers normally rig the process against Americans in favor of the migrants by posting the job advertisements in small newspapers with tiny circulations.
According to the lawsuit, Meta’s lawyers were using an alternative process that bypasses the PERM process.
They were using an EB-2 National Interest Waiver petition, which can get green cards for foreign workers without any advertisement. To use that process, companies have to attest that each foreign worker is exceptionally skilled, and the hiring is of “National Importance.”
But Tillinghast refused to sign a company document that claimed the visa worker had the required accomplishments.
The lawsuit claims:
15. In or about April or May 2024, Meta and [outside its immigration law firm] coordinated an I-140 EB-2 National Interest Waiver petition concerning Shenxun Wang.
16. [The firm] prepared or substantially prepared a proposed managerial reference or attestation letter addressed to USCIS.
17. The proposed letter attributed approximately $638 million in incremental advertising revenue to Wang.
18. James did not possess a factual basis to attest that Wang personally generated or was properly credited with that amount.
19. The draft stated or implied that Wang had created algorithms or artificial-intelligence tools.
20. James understood Wang’s actual role to be principally in product design and user experience and understood that engineering personnel were responsible for creating and maintaining algorithms and artificial-intelligence models.
21. The draft further represented or implied that Wang managed, led, or oversaw a team or cross-functional group in a manner that overstated Wang’s actual position.
22. The letter contained broader assertions concerning Wang’s national importance and the interest of the United States in facilitating his work.
23. James did not possess a factual, professional, or governmental basis to endorse those broader assertions.
24. James worked with Wang to revise the letter so that it contained only statements James could truthfully endorse concerning their working relationship and Wang’s actual work.
25. James removed or declined to endorse the broader national-interest portions of the letter….
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32. James also objected to Meta’s selective use of its immigration-support process for Chinese national employees.
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34. … members of James’s supervisory chain therefore had actual and contemporaneous knowledge of James’s refusal and objections.
35. After James declined to sign the broader letter, the national-interest portion was routed to [his boss] …
36. [His boss] thereafter supplied or signed the substitute national-interest letter. The substitute letter included or relied upon representations that James had refused to endorse, including representations concerning Wang’s revenue impact, algorithmic work, and leadership responsibilities.
Breitbart News has posted articles about rival Asian ethnic enclaves within Zuckerberg’s Meta,
“At Meta, 90% of my coworkers were Chinese, and non-Chinese were routinely excluded, disadvantaged, and targeted for layoffs,” said Jeremy Bernier, who was fired in early 2026 from a software engineering job at Meta. He added:
6 out of the 7 layoffs I observed targeted non-Chinese despite non-Chinese being the vast minority. Certain org[anizations] like ads and MRS [Meta Recommendation Systems for prioritizing Facebook posts] are notorious for being Chinese dominated.
“I think Americans would be outraged if they knew that their own citizens were getting marginalized and laid off at their own companies, while Chinese promote themselves up, conquer entire orgs, and reap millions [in pay and bonuses],” said Bernier, who is a 2012 graduate of Virginia Tech.
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