The nation’s biggest tech conglomerates continued hiring foreign workers through the H-1B visa program, even as they carried out mass layoffs of American employees, investigative reporter Lee Fang details.
Since the start of the year, hundreds of thousands of Americans in tech jobs have been laid off, with about 12,000 cut at Google, 10,000 out at Microsoft, close to 20,000 laid off at Amazon, and 10,000 cut from Meta Platforms which owns Facebook and Instagram.
Just weeks after announcing such layoffs, though, the same tech corporations continued hiring foreign workers on the H-1B visa program — known as the “outsourcing visa” to many Americans.
Lee Fang, formerly of The Intercept, reports:
Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, wrote a solemn letter in January, announcing his company’s decision to lay off 12,000 employees. [Emphasis added]
…
Just one month later, Pichai’s firm filed applications for low-paid foreign workers to come to America and take highly specialized tech jobs. Google filed dozens of applications for foreign workers to serve as software engineers, analytical consultants, user experience researchers, and other roles. Waymo, the self-driving car company owned by Google, also filed and received visa applications for engineering jobs. Many of the Google visas are for new employees, with some starting as soon as August 17th. [Emphasis added]
Newly disclosed data released yesterday by the Department of Labor shows thousands of recent H1-B foreign worker visas requested by firms that just underwent massive layoffs this year, including Facebook/Meta Platforms, Amazon, Zoom, Salesforce, Microsoft, and Palantir.
[Emphasis added]
That newly published data from Lee Fang matches similar research conducted by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), detailed by Breitbart News last month, which found that the top 30 tech corporations had announced a combined 85,000 layoffs while at the same time importing nearly 35,000 foreign H-1B visa workers to take coveted white-collar American jobs.
For years, Breitbart News has chronicled the abuses against white-collar American professionals as a result of the H-1B visa program. 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.
“Rather than turning to the H-1B program as a last resort when U.S. workers cannot be found, most employers hire H-1B workers because they can be underpaid and are de facto indentured to the employer,” EPI researchers Daniel Costa and Ron Hira write.
“This is evidenced by government data showing that technology companies continue to hire H-1B workers in large numbers while significantly reducing the sizes of their workforces,” they continue.
The H-1B visa program has caught scrutiny from Republicans for years, though not much has been done to eliminate outsourcing from corporations.
While president in 2020, for example, Donald Trump enacted reforms to require companies seeking foreign H-1B visa workers to offer the highest salaries possible and also saved a number of Americans’ jobs at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) from being outsourced to foreign H-1B visa workers.
Trump is currently the frontrunner in the GOP presidential primary race.
Likewise, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who announced his presidential candidacy this month, has criticized the H-1B visa program for its favoritism to multinational corporations against white-collar American professionals.
“… if there’s legal immigration that’s harming Americans, we shouldn’t do that either,” DeSantis said during a press conference this month. “For example, some of these H-1B visas, they would fire American tech workers and hire foreigners at lower wages. I don’t agree with that. I think that’s wrong.”
Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), running for the United States Senate in Indiana, previously put forth a blueprint for reforming the H-1B visa program — many provisions of which were backed by former Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) when he served as a ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The Banks bill would set a wage floor of $110,000 that companies would have to offer foreign H-1B visa workers or pay hires the same salary currently being paid to Americans doing the same job. Companies offering the highest salaries would be prioritized in the process.
Similarly, companies would be greatly limited in contracting with so-called “body shops” to replace their American employees with imported foreign H-1B visa workers under the Banks legislation.
RELATED: Fired Software Creators Have to Train H-1B Workers Replacing Them on How to Use Their Softwares, Says Tennessee Valley Authority Employee
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.