Lawsuit: Tech Company Hired to Build D.C. Obamacare Website Discriminated Against Americans

A lawsuit is accusing a high-tech firm that received taxpayer dollars to build the Washington, D.C., Obamacare exchange of discriminating against Americans in favor of foreigners.

According to Computerworld, Washington, D.C., “hired offshore outsourcing firm Infosys for $49.5 million to build its Healthcare Exchange,” and the “India-based Infosys brought in H-1B visa holders to work on the government project.” Approximately 3 of the 100 employees working on the healthcare exchange site were American, according to the lawsuit.

Layla Bolten, who “has a degree in computer science and has been in IT since 1996,” alleges that she was “harassed because she was not Indian and excluded from work conversations by supervisors who spoke Hindi. People with less experience were promoted over her, and she eventually quit.”

According to Computerworld, “Bolten is one of four IT workers from around the country suing Infosys for ‘ongoing national origin and race discrimination'” and “intentional employment discrimination.”

Data obtained by the plaintiffs indicated that Infosys had 59 locations across the United States that employed at least 50 people, and at a third of the sites 100% of the employees were Asian. Computerworld reports that “Infosys is among the top three users of the H-1B visa, and H-1B workers are predominately from India.” According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), nearly “58% of all the H-1B petitions approved in 2011 were from workers born in India; in 2012, that figure was 64%.”

Computerworld points out that “the Washington D.C. area does not lack people with tech skills,” for it has the most people with advanced and bachelor degrees among cities considered to be in the “largest metropolitan areas” in the United States. However, Infosys still favored workers from India.

The Obama administration and high-tech lobbies like Facebook have pushed for drastic increases in the number of high-tech visas even though nonpartisan scholars and studies have proven that there is surplus – not a shortage – of American high-tech workers.