H-1B, ARRA, and TARP

I was forwarded a job description for a position at Capital One by someone I know. They didn't want to know anything about the job or my advice on taking it or anything to that effect; they wanted to know what this note meant at the bottom of the posting:

As a recipient of TARP funding and under ARRA regulations, Capital One will not sponsor new H-1B petitions or transfer existing H1B Visas.

I was curious myself. So I did some research. The Washington D.C. Employment Law Update laid it out in March:

The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that employers receiving funds through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) or under section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act (covered funds) must meet additional requirements before hiring foreign nationals to work in the H-1B specialty occupation category.

These new requirements were established by the Employ American Workers Act (EAWA), a component of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) – otherwise known as the stimulus package – signed into law on February 17, 2009. Under EAWA, companies receiving covered funds must guarantee that they will not displace citizen employees

And if you still want to hire that person, you need to answer some more questions that basically guarantee the government that you didn't displace a US worker for this job.

This makes sense in practice (with all the taxpayer money going to the banks, you want them to hire US tax-paying citizens), but I was surprised (probably wrongly so) to hear it was being done in this manner, with disclosures like that in postings.

Here are some more details on this from U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services.