Forgotten Americans on H-1B: ‘This Is Complete Treason’

WASHINGTON, D.C. – While Americans who have lost their jobs to outsourcing are willing to speak up, they remain fearfully hushed about the issue, making sure their names and former employers are not released.

Every year, more than 100,000 foreign workers are brought to the U.S. on the H-1B visa and are allowed to stay for up to six years. That number has ballooned to potentially hundreds of thousands each year, as universities and non-profits are exempt from the cap. With more entering the U.S. through the visa, Americans are often replaced and forced to train their foreign replacements.

As Breitbart Texas spoke to a number of workers in front of the White House, a reoccurring factor was that Americans would only speak anonymously.

“I have to remain anonymous,” one told Breitbart Texas. “It’s in my severance package.”

He had to move from Atlanta to Washington, D.C. just to find a job after he had been outsourced by Infosys, India’s top consulting firm.

“This is also a national security threat because foreigners are dominating an entire American industry, the worker said.

“If the Indian worker can’t do their job, it’s your fault for training them wrong.”

One woman, a legal immigrant who was reluctant to speak to Breitbart Texas, said she was outsourced and laid-off three times, saying her husband’s job was also outsourced.

The woman said she lives in an upper-class neighborhood, but has eight to 10 foreign nationals on H-1B visas living across from her in a small apartment.

“Personally, I’m tired,” the woman said with frustration. “I’m losing my pension, my 401K. I was forced to do my engineering job and train my replacement.”

The woman said she would gets phone calls in the middle of the night and all throughout the day, even after work hours, as the training for the low-skilled foreign workers does had yet to end.

“I’m working 24/7,” she said.

The woman said she supported President Trump during the 2016 presidential election, but that if her employer at the time had found out, she’d have serious consequences.

“If anyone in my company knew I was supporting Trump at the time, I’d have lost my job on the spot,” the woman said.

Though she was too fearful to name the company she works for, the woman said she has been passed up by promotions time and time again solely because she was not an Indian national.

“This is just an excuse to get rid of older Americans.”

An older man who had worked for a company at a tech firm for decades told Breitbart Texas the H-1B visa and outsourcing is used by corporations to bring in primarily young, male Indian nationals to replace older Americans.

He said he would have to remain anonymous because his severance package with his former company “extorted” him out of speaking up about what was done by Tata Consulting Services.

“In order to get your severance, you have to sign a document that allows them to keep you quiet,” the man said.

The man said that the foreign workers replacing him were so low-skilled, that several had to do the job he was doing.

“The people I had to train had minimal skill set to do my job,” the man said. “These are not high-skilled workers.”

“I was a Democrat until I got screwed over.”

A woman, formerly a Democrat, said her vote for Trump was specifically because he opposed the abuse of American workers like her because of the H-1B visa.

“I voted for Trump,” the woman said. “I never thought in all my years that it would happen.”

The woman told Breitbart Texas that she saw nothing but discrimination against her in a contract she took, saying it was “sabotage.”

“I went into a contract and was not on the project for more than two weeks before I was fired,” the woman said with disgust. “I was very well educated in it. I’ve worked long term contracts before. Somehow, all of the sudden, I was incompetent.”

“They hate Americans,” the woman said of Infosys and Tata Consulting Services, two of the largest India-based outsourcing firms.

Now, she says she has gotten an insurance license and has been picking up smaller jobs since being laid-off. The woman said she makes less than 75 percent of what she previously made, talking about how the drove of foreign nationals entering the U.S. undercut American wages.

“Luckily, I’m old enough I can draw into some funds,” the woman said.

She also said that unlike many of the Americans who have lost their jobs to foreign workers on the H-1B visa, she has no sympathy for them.

“They know what they’re coming here to do,” she said of the discrimination she faced. “They will undermine you. I’ve never seen the level of depravity as I saw in my experience with this.”

“This is complete treason.”

Dawn, making a point to only give her first name, was laid-off and replaced by a foreign worker who she was forced to train.

Though other laid-off workers are excited to speak about their experience with outsourcing, even if anonymously, Dawn was more turned off by the fact that Congress has still not done passed a single measure to protect Americans from what she went through.

“We watched about 1,400 people train their foreign replacements in New York City and not a word of this was on the news,” Dawn said. “This is treason to the American people. They should have put an end to this a long time ago.”

She said Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, know exactly what is occurring to the American middle and working classes, but they choose to not lift a finger on the issue.

“All I can say is that this has been talking about for several years,” she said. “Our Congress knows what’s happening.”

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.