Marco Rubio promises to triple H-1B visas.
By Raif Karerat
Amidst a slew of lawsuits filed by U.S. IT workers who are claiming discrimination after being replaced by H-1B contractors, Computerworld has reported there may be federal interest in examining the issue.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices was previously asked by 10 U.S. senators in April to examine the IT layoffs at Southern California Edison (SCE) and to determine whether SCE or its contractors were “engaged in prohibited citizenship status discrimination.”
One of the cruxes of the matter is that U.S. IT workers, as a forced condition of their severance, are being made to train H-1B visa-holding contractor replacements to take over their jobs.
One of the most high profile ongoing H-1B cases is against entertainment titan Disney.
Disney IT workers “were terminated because they were American citizens and all their replacements were foreign-born Indians,” said Sara Blackwell, a Florida attorney, who is representing seven of the Disney workers at its parks and resort division.
Other discrimination claims, including age and disability, will be made as well. Those complaints are being filed with the U.S. Equal Opportunity Commission, which sees if a settlement is possible prior to any lawsuit, reported Computerworld.
“We need to protect American workers,” said James Otto, a California attorney who is representing a Disney ABC Television Group employee in that state.
Meanwhile, Republican presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida stated Tuesday that his preferred plan would involve tripling of H-1B visas for skilled workers, which he hopes to achieve by seeing the passage of his bipartisan I-Squared (Immigration Innovation) bill, which critics claim will hand further American jobs to immigrants.
The I-Squared bill has received tremendous backing from tech giants like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Larry Ellison of Oracle, and Bob Iger of Disney, according to conservative news outlet Breitbart.
2 Comments
These law suits are going nowhere. Congress went to great pain to protect corporations who want to replace American workers with cheap foreign labor from such law suits. Typically the law has passages which protect American workers then in another section it carves out exceptions which eliminate those protections.
There have been many such law suits over the years since 1990 by Americans who can not bring themselves to believe their own government would do this to them. None have even gone to trial.
I just cannot understand what people see in Rubio – I hope he loses so badly