Does Your Employer Actually File Green Cards? How to Check the Public PERM Record

A claim has been making the rounds this spring, built to terrify H-1B workers: "General Motors has 537 H-1B workers and zero PERM filings. Stanford has 340 H-1Bs and zero PERMs. Boston Consulting Group: zero. Mastercard Technologies: zero."

Scary, right? Your employer might be renting your visa years with no intention of ever filing your green card.

Here's the thing. At least two of those four claims don't hold up, and the reason they don't hold up is the single most important lesson about checking any employer's sponsorship record. Whoever ran those numbers wasn't lying. They fell into a data trap that catches almost everyone who looks at PERM filings for the first time.

Let's walk through what the public data actually says, why "zero PERMs" is usually a search error, when it's real, and how to run this check properly on your own employer before you bet five years of your life on them.

The Claims vs. the Data

Every PERM labor certification is public. The Department of Labor publishes quarterly disclosure files listing every filing with the employer's name on it, and tracker sites compile that data into per-company pages.

So what do those compilations show for the four companies in the claim?

Boston Consulting Group: not zero. Tracker compilations of DOL disclosure data show The Boston Consulting Group Inc filed roughly 223 labor certifications in FY 2025 alongside about 650 H-1B LCAs. BCG is a regular, active green card sponsor.

General Motors: not zero either. The same compilations show General Motors LLC with roughly 178 labor certifications in FY 2025. Meanwhile, one tracker's page for "General Motors Company", a differently named entity, shows 0 PERM filings in 2025 and 1 in FY 2026.

Same company. Two legal entity names. One shows an active sponsorship program, the other shows a wasteland. Which page do you think that scary zero was built on?

The Entity Name Trap

PERM and LCA filings are recorded under the exact legal entity that signs them, not the brand name you know. "Google" files as Google LLC. A bank might file under a dozen subsidiaries. A company that reorganizes mid-decade leaves its history split across old and new entity names.

That means a query for one spelling can return zero while the real filings sit under a sibling entity: LLC vs Inc vs Company, a "Technologies" subsidiary, a regional entity, an acquired company still filing under its old name.

Notice the fourth claim on the list was about "Mastercard Technologies", a specific entity name. That's the pattern. The narrower the entity string you search, the more likely you get a scary zero that means nothing.

When "Zero PERMs" Is Real: The Stanford Case

Now the uncomfortable part. Sometimes the gap is genuine, and universities are the clearest example.

Stanford's own administrative guide states that sponsorship for permanent residence is available to tenure-line and tenured faculty. Most of a university's H-1B population isn't tenure-line faculty. It's postdocs, research staff, lecturers, and clinical staff, and for those roles many universities simply do not sponsor green cards as a matter of policy.

Universities are also cap-exempt H-1B employers, so hiring on H-1B costs them nothing in lottery risk. The result is a large H-1B population with a structurally tiny PERM pipeline, and that's not a data artifact. It's written policy.

The lesson generalizes. A real sponsorship gap is usually a policy, not a secret. Up-or-out consulting tracks, contract-heavy staffing models, and postdoc-heavy labs all have known, discoverable sponsorship policies. Your job is to find the policy, not to reverse-engineer it from a single database query.

What the Ratio Actually Tells You

Once you've summed the entities correctly, the number that matters isn't the raw PERM count. It's the trend and the ratio.

An employer with 500 H-1B workers filing 150+ PERMs a year is running a real program. An employer with 500 H-1B workers filing 5 PERMs a year is sponsoring a favored few. An employer at a true zero across all entities for multiple years has a policy, whether they've told you or not.

And the broader climate matters right now. DOL's own statistics show PERM filings running about 17.6% below the prior year in early FY 2025, with more than 192,000 applications pending at the backlogged processing center. Employers have been slowing down filings at exactly the moment the visa bulletin has been retrogressing. Both ends of the pipeline are tightening.

Why does the filing decision matter so much? Because your priority date is locked in the day PERM is filed. Every year your employer delays the start is a year added to the back of your visa bulletin wait.

For an India-born applicant, a two-year internal policy delay isn't two years. It's two years plus the backlog growth behind it.

How To Run the Check Yourself

Fifteen minutes, three sources, in this order.

1. Tracker sites first (fast, but verify). Sites like MyVisaJobs, H1BGrader, and Visadoor compile the DOL disclosure files into searchable company pages. Search every entity variant, check at least two of the sites against each other, and look at 3-4 years of history, not one.

2. The DOL disclosure files (authoritative). The Office of Foreign Labor Certification publishes the raw PERM and LCA disclosure files quarterly on the DOL performance data page. This is the primary source every tracker builds on. If a tracker's number looks off, the spreadsheet settles it.

3. The USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub (the other half). This shows approved H-1B petitions by employer, which is a cleaner measure of the H-1B population than LCA counts, since one worker can generate multiple LCAs.

Then read the result like an analyst, not like a headline writer:

The Questions That Beat Any Database

The public record tells you what an employer did. Only the employer can tell you what they'll do for you. Before you join, or before you assume, ask directly:

"What is the written green card sponsorship policy for my role?" Not "do you sponsor", which invites a vague yes. Ask when the process starts: day one, after 12 months, after a performance gate?

"When would my PERM be filed?" The start date is the whole game because it sets your priority date. A "we sponsor after two years" policy costs an India-born EB-2 applicant far more than it appears to.

"Who pays, and which firm handles it?" By regulation, the employer must pay the PERM-specific costs, including attorney fees for the labor certification. An employer who suggests you'll cover PERM costs is telling you they don't know the rules or don't follow them. Either answer is your answer.

"Have there been recent layoffs in my occupation?" Layoffs in the same occupation can complicate PERM recruitment for months, and a layoff during your own process can void an unfiled PERM entirely.

If Your Employer Really Doesn't File

Suppose you run the check properly and the answer is a true zero, or a policy that excludes your role. You have more leverage than you think, because employer sponsorship is only one of the doors.

Self-petition lanes exist. EB-1A and EB-2 NIW don't require your employer's participation at all, and you can pursue either while sitting in your current job. The evidence you'd gather is about your career, not their policy.

Changing employers early beats changing late. If a green card is the goal and your employer won't file, every additional year there is a year of priority-date position you're giving away. The H-1B to green card roadmap walks the full sequence and where the clock actually binds.

The check works in reverse for your next offer. The same fifteen-minute record check tells you whether the company recruiting you files PERMs for people with your title. Bring it up in negotiation. "Your public record shows 12 PERM filings last year, none for engineers" is a very effective question.

FAQ

Bottom Line

The viral "zero PERMs" claim got the fear right and the data wrong. The disclosure data shows Boston Consulting Group filed roughly 223 labor certifications in FY 2025 and General Motors LLC roughly 178, both hiding in plain sight under the correct entity names. Stanford's gap is real, but it's a published faculty-only policy, not a scandal.

The real takeaways: your employer's green card behavior is public, reading it correctly means summing legal entities and watching multi-year trends, and the number that decides your future is the date your PERM gets filed. Check the record, get the policy in writing, and if the answer is truly zero, remember that self-petition pathways don't ask your employer's permission.

Want to see how an employer-sponsored PERM timeline compares against EB-1A, NIW, and every other route for your specific situation? The comparison tool runs all of them side by side with July 2026 data.