California: Hundreds of American IT Workers Are Replaced by Foreigners using H-1b Visas

The President likes to talk up the American middle class and how he is working to protect it. Meanwhile in the real world, the middle class is shrinking because of Washington policies like mass immigration, outsourcing and excess regulation.

Obama has courted the billionaires of Silicon Valley to be supporters, and the tech bosses like open borders for IT workers so they can make even more money. A major tool is the H-1b visa for foreign tech employees who are supposed to be used only when a citizen cannot be found to do the job.

On Friday, Fox News journalist William La Jeunesse reported on the current state of H-1b visas with a timely example: Southern California Edison has brought in hundreds of Indians to replace citizen employees.

LA JEUNESSE: The president talks a lot about protecting the middle class yet 400 American workers here in Los Angeles are losing good middle class jobs to foreign workers on visas approved by the administration. Laid off workers at SCE, Southern California’s largest utility are furious because they must also train replacements from India. [. . .]

The Immigration and Nationality Act requires the hiring of a foreign worker not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of US workers comparably employed, but experts say the law is routinely ignored. [. . .]

SCE will save about $40,000 per worker, about $16 million a year by replacing American workers with foreigners on an H-1b visa.

Professor Norm Matloff’s newish blog, Norm Says No, has a lot of information about the wrong idea that the US needs to import millions of tech workers because Americans aren’t interested in the occupation. Not so: the wealthy companies just want to save some money.

America’s Senator, Jeff Sessions, read from the Computerworld article below, concerning SCE’s use of H-1bs, starting at around 2:35, on the Senate floor on Thursday as part of a talk about Washington’s attack on the American worker.

Southern California Edison IT workers ‘beyond furious’ over H-1B replacements, By Patrick Thibodeau, Computerworld, February 4, 2015

About 500 IT jobs are cut at utility through layoffs and voluntary departures

Information technology workers at Southern California Edison (SCE) are being laid off and replaced by workers from India. Some employees are training their H-1B visa holding replacements, and many have already lost their jobs.

The employees are upset and say they can’t understand how H-1B guest workers can be used to replace them.

The IT organization’s “transition effort” is expected to result in about 400 layoffs, with “another 100 or so employees leaving voluntarily,” SCE said in a statement. The “transition,” which began in August, will be completed by the end of March, the company said.

“They are bringing in people with a couple of years’ experience to replace us and then we have to train them,” said one longtime IT worker. “It’s demoralizing and in a way I kind of felt betrayed by the company.”

SCE, Southern California’s largest utility, has confirmed the layoffs and the hiring of Infosys, based in Bangalore, and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in Mumbai. They are two of the largest users of H-1B visas.

The utility has a large IT department. In 2012, before any layoffs, it had about 1,800 employees, plus an additional 1,500 contract workers.

Computerworld interviewed, separately, four affected SCE IT employees. They agreed to talk on the condition that their names not be used.

The IT employees at SCE are “beyond furious,” said a second IT worker.

The H-1B program “was supposed to be for projects and jobs that American workers could not fill,” this worker said. “But we’re doing our job. It’s not like they are bringing in these guys for new positions that nobody can fill.

“Not one of these jobs being filled by India was a job that an Edison employee wasn’t already performing,” he said....