Op-ed: Does America Need More Foreign Tech Workers? No

Ten years ago, Disney fired its American IT staff in Orlando, Fla., and replaced them with “high-skilled” foreign workers on H-1B visas.

The foreign workers were so “highly skilled” that the Americans they were replacing had to train them on how to do their jobs — and if they didn’t, they’d lose their severance pay.

The politicians fumed, with one senator saying, “This program was created to help fill jobs when there were labor shortages, not to take jobs away from anyone.”

Except for the H-1B visa program — like most immigration programs for “skilled” workers — is intended to replace American workers and hold down their salaries. H-1B workers, mainly from India, have been used by dozens of corporations to replace their American staff with cheaper foreign labor.

One aspect of the visa, which is especially attractive to employers, is that it ties the worker to a specific job, like the indentured servitude of earlier centuries. An American or permanent-resident worker is free labor — he can ask for higher pay, seek promotion into a new position, or change employers altogether. A foreigner can do these things only with great difficulty or not at all. Employers praise this as “loyalty,” but what they really mean is, “We own them.”

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[Read the rest at DC Journal.]