It’s bad enough that Big Tech is swaying our elections and shifting votes, but it’s also shifting American jobs — to foreigners. There’s salt in this wound, too: The displaced American workers are sometimes forced to train their replacements.
Worse still, this isn’t a new story, but was occurring under the Obama administration. Yet the outrage continues even now with President Trump in office. As Fox News host Tucker Carlson reported Wednesday:
President Trump travelled to India last week to meet with that country’s Prime Minister, Prime Minister Modi. One of the central issues at their meeting was the H-1B visa program. That program doles out roughly 85,000 visas a year to foreigners so they can move to this country and take American jobs.
I’m not exaggerating, that’s what it does; the vast majority of these visas are given to people from India. As a candidate in 2016, Donald Trump called for ending this program entirely, but as president that hasn’t happened, though the Trump administration has made the visas slightly harder to get.
So why is the program still around? Why is it so durable? That’s an easy question to answer: It’s a favorite of tech companies, which claim they simply can’t find any Americans skilled enough or smart enough to do tech work.
That’s a lie, a provable lie: Companies routinely use H-1Bs as a means to fire their existing American workers and replace them with lower paid foreigners. Often the fired workers are made to train their replacements before they’re terminated. The process for the replaced workers is painful and humiliating. Company executives tell them they’re being reassigned to a completely new company with a new role that consists of training people to do the job they once did. When they are not needed any more, they’re cast aside .
One AT&T employee, who’d been with the company for decades and appeared anonymously above, said she was told months ago “that she was no longer needed,” Carlson reported. The woman furthermore claimed that there were at least 8,000 other AT&T employees in her boat, people being “rebadged” to another company and forced to train a cut-rate foreign replacement.
“She expects to be officially fired within a year,” related Carlson.
Another interviewee, a former AT&T employee, said that the replacements are all from one place: India. In fact, Carlson’s producers obtained company training documents wholly pertaining to Indian cultural norms; they warn, for instance “that Indian men will not shake hands with American women,” states Carlson.
{modulepos inner_text_ad}
AT&T even provided a list of “approved topics” that could be discussed with Indian replacements; mentioning their nation’s human rights record or religious conflict was verboten.
Then there’s the notion that these replacements are smarter than Americans. Billionaire Mark Cuban alluded to this in a 2017 interview with Carlson (video below), but is it true? The fired ex-AT&T employee sure may not think so. “Some of the folks that we work with, they are very sharp,” he said of the H-1B replacements, “but we’ve got some, if they were dumber, we would have to water them twice a week.”
Dumb or not, they sure save AT&T a lot of money. The company told the ex-employee that “you do not get a severance package; you’re not eligible for one since we found you another job.” Moreover, he and others were told they’d be denied their annual bonus next year unless they agreed to work at the new company training their replacements.
Unmentioned is that this replacement is apparently a violation of law, which stipulates that an H-1B-visa recruit can only be retained if it “will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of similarly employed U.S. workers.”
As stated earlier, however, this illegality is nothing new, as the stories here and here evidence. Then there’s the 2017 story of Craig Diangelo (video below), a displaced tech worker who ran for Congress in 2018.
Aside from not being new, the H-1B racket also is not too partisan, with Democrats and Republicans supporting it. Just consider Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). While inveighing against illegal migration in 2013, he nonetheless proposed (at 3:28 in this video) increasing H-1B visas 500 percent and doubling legal immigration.
Moreover, the H-1B racket doesn’t have just economic effects — it has cultural and political ones, too. For example, ponder a warning issued by Sarah Blackwell, an employment lawyer who represents displaced American workers and who appeared in Carlson’s Wednesday segment. “When you’re watching so many people suffer at the hands of a few getting rich and no one’s protecting them,” she lamented, “then people will stop thinking capitalism is the right thing to do.”
This isn’t the correct reaction, of course, but it is a very human one. We should remember here that maintaining a tight labor market by controlling immigration is the right way to “spread the wealth around”; it increases American workers’ value, allowing them to command higher salaries. And insofar as companies really do need more skilled workers, emphasis should be placed on training Americans not just in school, but also in the corporate world.
Lastly, note that recruiting these Indian workers (almost exclusively Hindu) moves us toward socialism for another reason. Most of them will no doubt get citizenship and then vote largely Democrat. In fact, 90 percent of Hindus voted for Barack Obama.
So while the immigrationists love to tout legal immigration, it’s not just that Americans are (perhaps) legally being done out of their jobs. They’re also “legally” being pushed into socialism and “legally” having their culture stolen away.
Legalized bad ideas are still bad ideas.
Photo: gorodenkoff / iStock / Getty Images Plus
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
