IBM Laid Off 20K Older Americans, Sought to Import 37K Foreign Workers

Outsourcing corporation IBM laid off about 20,000 older Americans in the last five years, a new investigation reveals, while the tech multinational sought to import at least 37,000 foreign workers to take U.S. jobs.

A joint investigation by ProPublica and Mother Jones reveals that about 60 percent of the Americans that were laid off by IBM in the last five years were workers over the age of forty. This amounts to about 20,000 40-years-old and older Americans being laid off by IBM since 2014.

At the same time, IBM has attempted to import at least 37,000 foreign workers on H-1B visas since 2016.

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.

Publicly available data reviewed by Breitbart News reveals that in 2018, alone, IBM was one of the top three multinational corporations trying to import more than 10,000 H-1B foreign workers to take American jobs.

In 2017 and 2016, combined, IBM sought to import nearly 26,000 H-1B foreign workers to take coveted, high-paying jobs in the tech industry.

As Breitbart News has chronicled, American workers have been readily laid off from outsourcing firms like IBM, Infosys, Tata Consulting, and Capgemini, all of which are responsible for allegedly forcing their laid-off Americans employees to train their H-1B foreign replacements.

In cases highlighted by 60 Minutes, American workers laid off and replaced by H-1B foreign workers revealed that many of their offices, once entirely made up of Americans, had shifted to primarily male, Indian nationals.

Despite laying off thousands of American workers, and now having more employees on the payroll in India rather than the U.S., IBM CEO Ginni Rometty’s salary has continued to climb.

For example, Rometty’s salary has climbed to now upwards of $33 million a year. In 2014, Rometty’s salary was roughly $18 million, though that was before she gave herself a raise in 2015 when she raked in close to $20 million.

As Breitbart News most recently reported, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has tightened rules to try to prevent multinational corporations from outsourcing American jobs to H-1B foreign workers.

Since President Trump’s administration set up a hotline for Americans to report H-1B visa abuse, there have been more than 5,000 cases of alleged abuse within the visa program reported.

Tech conglomerates like Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple hide their H-1B foreign worker hires through outsourcing firms like Cognizant, Tata, and Infosys, as Breitbart News has reported. The practice allows the corporations to claim they are not undercutting or replacing American workers at extraordinary rates, as they simply contract the foreign workers through the outsourcing firms.