Here is a good article by Prog Chik about H-1B visas and their abuse.
We have all heard of the popular H-1B visas. Those are visas given to foreign workers with skills that we don’t have enough of in the United States. Many of the ubiquitous Indian computer professionals in the United States started out that way.
However, in reality, many IT companies abuse this visa to hire lower-cost foreigners to keep their IT overhead down, at the expense of American workers and the jobs they held. Recently this happened at Disney, where they literally let 250 people in IT go, so their jobs could be taken by H-1B workers, which they, ironically, had to train for the first 90 days. See more about this on Keith Barrett’s blog.
Of course, this was never the intent of the H-1B program.
The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States.
The law establishes certain standards in order to protect similarly employed U.S. workers from being adversely affected by the employment of the nonimmigrant workers, as well as to protect the H-1B nonimmigrant workers.
Clearly, Disney grossly violated this and the intent of the program. This is an example why run-away capitalism does not work. Corporations are motivated only by the bottom line. They do not care about the welfare of the individual and the common good. Disney basically put 250 highly skilled American professionals on the street and brought in low-cost nonimmigrant foreigners to fill their jobs. They outsourced American jobs.
And they are getting away with it, because we support it by not enforcing the framework of the H-1B program.
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