Multinational telecommunications conglomerate AT&T is expected to lay off more than 1,000 American workers, including those in the Midwest and South, while the company continues importing foreign workers.
This week, AT&T announced that it would be laying off roughly 600 Americans across the Midwest, according to AppleInsider. Additionally, the company will lay off about 700 American workers with the AT&T subsidiary DirectTV and another 700 workers in the Texas and Missouri regions.
This month, AT&T also laid off about 215 American workers in nine southern states. Overall, according to AppleInsider, the layoffs are impacting Americans in California, Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia.
Americans expecting to be handed a pink slip at the company told AppleInsider that they were given three weeks to find a lower-paying job inside the company or be permanently laid off.
While the multinational corporation lays off Americans, however, its subsidiaries have continued importing foreign workers through H-1B visas.
For example, AT&T Services, Inc., a subsidiary of AT&T, has tried to import nearly 587 foreign workers on the H-1B visa program to take American jobs. In 2016 alone, AT&T Services, Inc. attempted to bring more than 150 foreign workers to the U.S. to do high-paying technology jobs that Americans could have otherwise taken.
Every year, more than 100,000 foreign workers are brought to the U.S. on H-1B visas 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 program’s caps. With more entering the U.S. through the visa, Americans are often replaced and forced to train their foreign replacements.
The H-1B visa often serves as the first step of outsourcing Americans’ jobs for multinational corporations. For example, multiple laid off American workers have previously explained to Breitbart News that companies use the H-1B visa to originally import foreign workers to do their jobs for cheaper, though eventually, the goal is to send the foreign worker and the job back to their native country where they can further reduce the labor cost.
In 2014, AT&T reportedly cut a $50 million deal with Infosys, one of the biggest multi-billion dollar outsourcing firms in the U.S. As Breitbart News has reported, former Infosys executive Erin Green has filed a discrimination lawsuit against the company, alleging that it wildly favors Indian nationals over Americans.
The lawsuit states:
Infosys maintains roughly 200,000 employees working in the United States. While roughly 1% of the U. S. population is of the South Asian race and national origin, roughly 93%-94% of Infosys’s United States workforce is of the South Asian national origin (primarily Indian). This disproportionately South Asian and Indian workforce, by race and national origin, is a result of Infosys’s intentional employment discrimination against individuals who are not South Asian, including discrimination in the hiring, promotion, compensation and termination of individuals.
While the lawsuit does not allege any specific abuses of the H-1B or L-1 visa, where hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals are allowed to enter the U.S. every year, Green does note that the visas were used to increase Infosys’ already large Indian workforce:
Infosys has gone to great lengths to obtain its primarily South Asian work force in the U. S., in particular by utilizing professional H-1B and L-1 work visas to bring South Asians (primarily Indians) into the United States to work in information technology (“IT”) consulting roles, as its IT consulting business model dictates, and other non-IT capacities, including to replace or supplant non-South Asians. Plaintiff’s career at Infosys exemplifies the systematic pattern of discrimination at Infosys.
White and black employees at Infosys, according to Green’s lawsuit, were hardly ever promoted and even had their evaluations downgraded compared to their Indian national counterparts.
Within the H-1B visa industry, young, male Indian nationals are favored than any other cohort, according to research by the Center for Immigration Studies. Nearly 70 percent of all H-1B visa-holders are from India.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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