In a front-page article, the New York Times reports that layoffs in which IT workers are replaced with immigrants on temporary H-1B visas, sometimes trained by the people they’re replacing, “are raising new questions about how businesses and outsourcing companies are using the temporary visas.” While federal guidelines say the foreigners should fill positions that American workers can’t be found for, legal loop holes mean that “companies do not have to recruit American workers first or guarantee that Americans will not be displaced.” In fact, “for years, most top recipients of the visas have been outsourcing or consulting firms” that “import workers for large contracts to take over entire in-house technology units.” The article focuses on Disney, which in October laid off 250 employees and transferred their jobs to immigrants on temporary visas brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India, some of whom were trained by the people they replaced.
The New York Times reports that Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) called on Secretary Johnson in a letter to investigate “potential misuses” of the H-1B visa program “after a report in The New York Times that technology employees at Walt Disney World in Orlando and other companies lost their jobs to immigrants and had to train their replacements.” The Times “reported Wednesday that about 250 Disney workers were laid off last year and many were replaced by immigrants hired by an outsourcing company based in India.” Former Disney workers are cited saying they “were struggling to find new technology jobs in the Orlando area” and have been told by local contractors with Disney that “they could not hire recently laid-off Disney employees until one year after their termination.”
From the news release of the American Association for Justice.
