Amicus Brief Tech companies This is an employment epidemic across the nation where companies sponsor foreign national for domestic jobs, leaving thousands to train their replacements. We have not addresses how many could be purposely placed for industrial espionage.
Related reading: China’s Best Method of Industrial Espionage
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Apple, Google, Microsoft pile in: 97 US tech firms file brief against Trump’s travel ban
In part from ZDNet: Immigrants or their children founded 200 US companies that generate $4.2 trillion in annual revenues, the brief highlights, among them Apple, AT&T, and Google, as well as Ford, General Electric, McDonald’s, Boeing, and Disney.
“Businesses and employees have little incentive to go through the laborious process of sponsoring or obtaining a visa, and relocating to the United States, if an employee may be unexpectedly halted at the border.
“Skilled individuals will not wish to immigrate to the country if they may be cut off without warning from their spouses, grandparents, relatives, and friends. They will not pull up roots, incur significant economic risk, and subject their family to considerable uncertainty to immigrate to the United States in the face of this instability.” Full article here.
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The H1-B visa program has a cap to the number allowed to be issued. It is a visa program that needs more scrutiny by Congress for the sake of American employees. There have been abuses to the program and further companies like Disney hire foreign nationals to replaced domestic employees driving down the salary costs.
Janet Napolitano, the former Secretary of the Department of Homeland security and now the president of the University of California system knows it all so well and how to work the system.
In part from the LATimes: Using a visa loophole to fire well-paid U.S. information technology workers and replace them with low-paid immigrants from India is despicable enough when it’s done by profit-making companies such as Southern California Edison and Walt Disney Co.
But the latest employer to try this stunt sets a new mark in what might be termed “job laundering.” It’s the University of California. Experts in the abuse of so-called H-1B visas say UC is the first public university to send the jobs of American IT staff offshore. That’s not a distinction UC should wear proudly. Full op-ed here.
*** One of 5 huge examples beyond California is:
Pfizer Connecticut R&DIn 2008, workers at pharmaceutical giant Pfizer’s New London and Groton (Connecticut) research and development campus raised the alarm: They were being replaced by Indian workers on H-1B visas and forced to train their replacements. Those outsourced workers were scheduled to return to India, where they will run the same systems as their U.S. counterparts, albeit at a cheaper rate and with diminished benefits. The move was part of an outsourcing agreement signed in 2005 between Pfizer, Infosys Technologies and Satyam Computer Services. More here.
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A 100 page Joint Venture report for tech companies includes the following text:
Silicon Valley has an extraordinarily large share of residents who are foreign born (37.4%, compared to California, 27.1%, or the United States, 13.3%). This population share increases to 50% for the employed, core working age population (ages 25-44), and even higher for certain occupational groups. For instance, nearly 74% of all Silicon Valley employed Computer and Mathematical workers ages 25-44 in 2014 were foreign-born. Correspondingly, the region also has an incredibly large share of foreign-language speakers, with 51% of Silicon Valley’s population over age five speaking a language other than exclusively English at home (compared to 43% in San Francisco, 44% in California, and 21% in the United States as a whole). This majority share in 2014 was up from 49% in 2011.
*** The Senate held a hearing in 2015 with a few former employees that were forced to train their foreign replacements. Many of these employees are paid a severance package but it also includes a major stipulation to remain mute on the topic as noted below:
My former company, a large utility company, replaced 220 American IT workers with H-1Bs…we would have to train them in order to receive our severance packages. This was one of the most humiliating situations that I have ever been in as an IT professional.
The whole IT department was going through the same fate as myself. Those were the longest and hardest five months of my life. Not only did I lose a work family, but I lost my job and my self-esteem. We had constant emails sent by HR that we could not talk about this situation to anyone or make posts to social media. If we did, we would be fired immediately and not get our severance. Read the full article here.
