GM Sought to Outsource 2.8K U.S. Jobs to Foreigners While Laying Off Americans

HAMTRAMCK, MI - OCTOBER 11: Assembly line workers assemble Chevy Volt electric vehicles an
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Multinational corporation General Motors (GM) sought to import nearly 2,800 foreign workers in the last three years to take U.S. jobs while laying off American workers.

GM will be laying off at least 4,250 of its white-collar workers in Canada and America — with the vast majority in the U.S. — starting next week.

The layoffs are just a small component of the corporation’s mass layoff scheme of 14,700 workers in North America — including at least 3,300 American factory workers. Meanwhile, GM is ramping up production of electric cars in China.

In 2019, GM expects to stop production at four American plants, including Detroit-Hamtramck and Warren Transmission in Michigan, Lordstown Assembly in Ohio, and Baltimore Operations in Maryland. This comes after GM laid off about 1,500 American workers in Lordstown in 2018, while their Mexico production remained unaffected.

At the same time GM has been laying off American workers, the corporation has been importing foreign workers from countries like India, China, Brazil, and South Korea.

Between 2016 and 2018, GM attempted to outsource nearly 700 American jobs in Warren, Michigan, to foreign workers brought in on the H-1B visa. The corporation also tried to outsource 167 U.S. jobs to H-1B foreign workers in Detroit, Michigan, another 154 U.S. jobs in Milford, Michigan, an additional 82 U.S. jobs in Pontiac, Michigan, and about 20 U.S. jobs in Roswell, Georgia.

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. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News. More than 85,000 Americans annually potentially lose their jobs to foreign labor through the H-1B visa program.

Last year, alone, U.S. businesses attempted to outsource nearly 420,000 American jobs to foreign workers, a population that exceeds the total population of Tampa, Florida.

The U.S. high-paying jobs GM outsourced to foreign workers while laying off American workers over the last three years include nearly 320 electrical engineering jobs, nearly 320 mechanical engineering jobs, more than 220 software developer jobs, and about 66 commercial and industrial designer jobs.

GM even outsourced nearly 150 U.S. jobs at its financial services wing in Arlington, Fort Worth, and Irving, Texas, as well as financial jobs in Detroit, Michigan, and Charlotte, North Carolina. The vast majority of these foreign workers imported to take these jobs were from India.

The United Auto Workers (UAW) union has launched a campaign urging consumers to boycott GM for their offshoring and outsourcing business practices that is leaving thousands of American workers laid off just years after the corporation was bailed out by U.S. taxpayers and received a massive tax cut.

“Companies like General Motors have an obligation to build where they sell and stop exporting jobs abroad,” UAW President Gary Jones said in a statement. “After all, we invested in General Motors in their darkest days. Now they need to invest in us.”

As Breitbart News previously reported, more than 2.7 million H-1B foreign workers have been approved to come to the U.S. to take American jobs between 2007 and 2017. During that same period, businesses tried to outsource almost 3.5 million American jobs to foreign workers instead of hiring Americans.

About four million young Americans enter the workforce each year, many looking for white-collar jobs in the STEM fields. Those Americans’ prospects of finding work are crippled by the country’s legal immigration process, which admits more than 1.5 million immigrants and hundreds of thousands of foreign visa workers annually.

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

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