But is there really a dearth of STEM-proficient American workers? (click here) Qualcomm, the San Diego-based cellphone smart-chip producer, announced
last week that it plans to lay off 4,500 employees. But just four months
ago, Qualcomm was “scrambling” to hire H-1B applicants. Likewise with
Microsoft, which announced last year that it would be laying off 18,000
workers and introduced plans for another 7,800 cuts three weeks ago,
even as it remains an enthusiastic supporter of the resurrected
I-Squared bill co-authored by Marco Rubio earlier this year. That bill
would triple the number of H-1B visas to 195,000.
It’s not hard to imagine that Qualcomm, Microsoft, and others hope
to follow the Disney model. Late last year, Disney, a company with
significant IT interests, laid off 250 workers. They were replaced by
H-1B recipients. And, like some 400 workers laid off from Southern
California Edison last year, the Disney employees were required to
participate in a “knowledge transfer” — i.e., they were forced to train
the foreign workers who took their jobs....
...2013 Infosys and Tata, two leading offshoring firms, paid computer-systems analysts on H-1B visas $20,000 less than the average annual wage ($91,990) for analysts in Los Angeles that year — despite the legal requirement to pay H-1B employees the “prevailing wage” in an area for their given occupation....
...2013 Infosys and Tata, two leading offshoring firms, paid computer-systems analysts on H-1B visas $20,000 less than the average annual wage ($91,990) for analysts in Los Angeles that year — despite the legal requirement to pay H-1B employees the “prevailing wage” in an area for their given occupation....
