According to investigative writer Lee Fang, the largest tech corporations in the country continued to use the H-1B visa program to hire foreign workers while mass-firing American workers.
Since the beginning of the year, tens of thousands of Americans working in the technology sector have lost their employment, including 12,000 at Google, 10,000 at Microsoft, close to 20,000 at Amazon, and 10,000 from Meta Platforms, the company that owns Instagram and Facebook.
However, just a few weeks after announcing these layoffs, the same IT companies resumed employing foreign employees via the H-1B visa program, sometimes known as the “outsourcing visa” by many Americans.
Former employee of The Intercept Lee Fang reports:
“Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, announced his company’s plan to begin laying off 12,000 workers in a somber letter in January.”
“Only a month later, Pichai’s company submitted applications to bring low-wage foreign laborers to the United States to fill highly skilled tech positions. Google submitted several dozen applications for foreign employees to fill positions as user experience researchers, analytical consultants, software engineers, and other positions. The Google-owned self-driving vehicle business Waymo also submitted and accepted engineering visa applications. Several of the Google visas are intended for new hires, some of whom will begin work on August 17th.”
“According to recently published statistics from the Department of Labor, companies including Facebook/Meta Platforms, Zoom, Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft, as well as Palantir have recently sought hundreds of H1-B foreign worker visas.”
The newly released data from Lee Fang is consistent with earlier research from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which was covered by Breitbart News this past month. That research discovered that the top 30 tech companies had announced a total of 85,000 layoffs while simultaneously hiring nearly 35,000 foreigners on H-1B visas to fill coveted white-collar American jobs.
We have been documenting the mistreatment of American white-collar workers as a consequence of the H-1B visa program for years. Approximately 650,000 foreign employees on H-1B visas are present in the country at any one time. Americans are often fired throughout the process and made to teach their foreign replacements.
“The majority of employers hire H-1B employees due to the fact that they are typically underpaid and are effectively contracted to the employer, instead of opting to the H-1B program as their last option when American employees can’t be found,” wrote EPI researchers Daniel Costa and Ron Hira.
“This is proven by government statistics revealing that technology firms continue bringing in H-1B workers in huge numbers while drastically lowering the total size of their workforces,” the authors add.
Republicans have been questioning the H-1B visa program for years, but nothing has been done to stop corporate outsourcing.
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