(WND)—In a time when Americans face mounting student debt, stagnant wages and increasing job competition, a little-known government program continues to certify hundreds of thousands of permanent jobs for foreign workers, even when qualified U.S. citizens are available, willing and able.
The labor certification process known as “PERM” (Program Electronic Review Management) allows employers to sponsor foreign nationals for green cards only if no qualified U.S. worker is available. According to federal law, employers must first complete a good-faith test of the U.S. labor market, which includes specific recruitment steps such as two Sunday newspaper ads, internal postings and three additional recruitment methods from a Department of Labor-approved list.
But in practice, employers can exploit the outdated list of approved recruitment methods by avoiding major online platforms and even their own company career sites. Instead, they often use limited-access alternatives such as obscure job boards, local or ethnic newspapers, or short-duration radio ads that technically satisfy the rules on paper, but drastically reduce the chances that qualified U.S. workers will ever see or apply for the position.
In 2024, the Department of Labor processed 116,427 PERM applications to hire foreign workers, approving nearly 88% of them. Only 5.4% (6,364) were denied. This means tens of thousands of U.S. jobs were certified for foreign workers without a transparent or fair recruitment process. The Department of Labor publishes quarterly data on employer applications to sponsor foreign workers, including both H-1B and PERM filings, which offers insight into the hiring and immigration practices of U.S. employers and their immigration attorneys.
An analysis of PERM filings from 2020 to 2024 reveals how major U.S. technology companies use the green card sponsorship process to secure foreign labor for high-paying roles, often without conducting genuine or competitive hiring searches. The data show consistent reliance on minimal recruitment efforts, including outdated tactics like requiring U.S. applicants to submit paper resumes by mail.
These methods, previously flagged by the Department of Justice as barriers to American workers, were often used even by large tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Workday.
For example, PERM-required job ads published in the May 9, 2021, print edition of the Mercury News instructed jobseekers to apply via postal mail, despite the fact that these companies already had digital hiring systems in place.
Similar tactics triggered a high-profile federal investigation involving Facebook – now Meta. In 2021, the Department of Justice and the Department of Labor reached a settlement with Facebook after alleging it had intentionally implemented PERM recruitment in a way to deter U.S. applicants. According to the complaint, Facebook did not post PERM roles on its public careers page and it required submission of resumes by physical mail, methods the DOJ concluded discouraged American workers from applying:
“Facebook created a separate hiring process for PERM positions that intentionally discouraged U.S. workers from applying. For example, while Facebook typically accepts applications online, it required that applications for PERM positions be submitted by mail only.”
“Facebook used recruitment methods for PERM positions that were less effective than those it used for other positions, intentionally deterring U.S. workers from applying to positions that the company sought to fill with temporary visa holders.”
As part of its settlement, Facebook was required to change its PERM practices, posting jobs on its public website, accepting electronic applications and using the same hiring processes for PERM roles as for other jobs. The company also agreed to federal oversight, employee training and regular reporting on its hiring activity.
Since then, industry reports on the platform Blind show that Meta has seen a rise in PERM denials, suggesting that when forced to conduct fair recruitment, companies do in fact encounter qualified American candidates.
The evidence is overwhelming that companies like Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Google and others, despite consistently lobbying for more foreign-worker visas on the basis of a so-called “talent shortage,” are fully capable of finding qualified Americans when they are actually required to recruit them.
Indeed, when employers go to such lengths to avoid recruiting qualified U.S. workers, even under a program like PERM that explicitly requires a good-faith labor market test, their own actions contradict claims of a shortage. The evidence suggests it is not that they can’t find qualified Americans, it’s that they are deliberately avoiding them.
If this is happening in a program like PERM, which includes at least some legal safeguards and penalties, the risks are far greater under programs like H-1B and STEM OPT, which contain no such protections for U.S. workers. Without enforcement or accountability, these visa channels allow companies to bypass the domestic workforce entirely, undermining both the integrity of the labor market and the future of American employment.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
