The Microsoft Corporation is expected to lay-off up to 3,000 employees as the tech conglomerate continues to request and hire more foreign help.
In a new report following rumors of mass lay-offs at Microsoft, company executives confirmed that potentially 3,000 jobs from the sales department would be cut. Executives said employees working outside the U.S. would be the most impacted by the lay-offs, but did also confirm that about 25 percent of the lay-offs would impact employees working stateside.
A Microsoft spokesperson spun the mass lay-offs as simply “changes” to “better serve our customers and partners.”
“Today, we are taking steps to notify some employees that their jobs are under consideration or that their positions will be eliminated,” the Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC. “Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis. This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time-to-time, re-deployment in others.”
Currently, Microsoft has more employees working outside the U.S., roughly 121,000, than those domestic, about 71,000.
As the tech giant is performing lay-offs, foreign workers through the H-1B visa and Optional Practical Training (OPT) program continue to be hired by the corporation.
In 2016, Microsoft was the ninth-largest requester for foreign workers under the H-1B visa, asking for a whopping 4,575 workers. In 2017, Microsoft increased their requests, demanding more than 5,000.
Every year, more than a 100,000 new foreign guest workers enter the U.S. under the H-1B visa. Since universities and non-profits are exempt from the cap, the number of foreign workers taking American jobs has ballooned to the hundreds of thousands.
Those H-1B requests by Microsoft do not include the corporation’s demand for foreign workers that executives hide through outsourcing firms, as Breitbart Texas reported.
Microsoft, like Cisco, Google, and Facebook, hide usage of the H-1B by contracting foreign workers through an outsourcing firm and pays them less than when they hire foreign workers directly.
At the Microsoft Corporation’s headquarters, 43 percent of the H-1B workers were applied for through an outsourcing outfit.
As Breitbart News recently reported, Microsoft is also one of the top recruiters of the some 330,000 foreign nationals who get to remain in the U.S. after graduating from college through the OPT program, taking coveted jobs from American graduates.
Despite lay-offs, Microsoft has continued lobbying not just for more foreign guest workers to hire, which are often much cheaper than if the company were to hire Americans, but they have most recently begun lobbying for amnesty through the term “comprehensive immigration reform.”
As Breitbart Texas reported, in the first quarter of 2017 during Trump’s presidency, Microsoft lobbied more for immigration and the H-1B visas than any other tech company. In Microsoft’s five out of eight lobbying reports, it referred to “high-skilled immigration,” which is synonymous with the H-1B visa, as well as amnesty, which would drastically depreciate U.S. wages.
Microsoft is generally the biggest pusher for more H-1B foreign workers and amnesty for illegal immigrant, lobbying for those issues in 340 lobbying reports since 2008, when former President Obama first took office.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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