An IT professional filed suit against Meta, the parent company of Facebook, alleging it didn’t hire him because he was a US citizen, according to court filings.

Instead, the lawsuit said the company preferred visa holders — such as those on H-1B visas — at sites in the US because it could pay them less for the same tasks, according to the filings.

The plaintiff in the suit is Purushothaman Rajaram, a naturalized US citizen who lives in Pennsylvania.

Rajaram has nearly 20 years of experience in IT and was considered for employment at Facebook on two occasions in 2020, the filings said. The first was in May 2020 when he was contacted by Infosys for a position at Facebook, and the second was in June 2020 by Facebook directly. He was hired on neither occasion.

The suit seeks class action status and was filed on 17 May.

“By law, H-1B visa workers must be paid by their employer at least as much as other individuals with similar experience and qualifications for the specific employment in question,” according to the lawsuit. “Thus, the only reason Facebook would choose to hire and relegate certain positions to visa holders is to pay them less than American counterparts, an unlawful practice that is known in the industry as ‘wage theft.’”

Meta hires H-1B visa holders directly, according to the suit, and has secured more than 20,000 H-1B visas with a vast majority for employees who will perform software engineer roles. It also said Meta is an H-1B visa dependent employer in that 15% or more of its US workforce is on an H-1B visa.

In addition, the suit said Meta also brings in H-1B visa workers from third-party vendors such as Infosys Inc. and Accenture.

Referred to in Rajaram’s lawsuit is legal action by the US Departments of Labor and Justice against Facebook where the social networking giant agreed to pay $4.75 million to settle allegations of bias against US workers.

Rajaram’s suit seeks damages including punitive damages.

It was filed in federal court for the Northern District of California. Case number is 3:2022cv02920.