Many American graduates will lose their jobs in the coronavirus meltdown unless they pressure C-suite executives to shrink the million-plus H-1B visa workers on the payrolls, say lawyers, political activists, and Americans who have lost jobs in prior mass layoffs.
American graduates “must act now to ensure the huge pending layoffs are imposed on Indian H-1Bs instead of on Americans,” said Marie Larson, a co-founder of the American Workers Coalition.
American and Indian managers have already replaced American graduates with an army of roughly one million Indian white-collar workers, including roughly 750,0000 H-1B workers. Hundreds of thousands of other visa and work-permit workers are imported from China, Europe, and Asia under rules allowing renewable stays one to three years.
Many of these visa workers are hidden from media outlets and American employees because they are hired via a network of Indian-run subcontracting firms, such as Tata or Infosys. House Democrats — aided by business lobbyists — have drafted a bill to protect the visa workers, and the Department of Homeland Security took two steps last week to help accelerate the 2020 arrival of 85,000 more H-1B workers.
American managers will be reluctant to fire their visa workers, in part, because it is more difficult to rebuild a visa-worker labor force than it is to rehire fired Americans.
“There’s plenty of evidence that Indian managers will be reluctant to fire fellow Indians,” said Ron Hira, an expert on the outsourcing industry and an associate professor at Howard University. “There are cultural network effects on hiring — anybody who studies diversity and underrepresented minorities or females knows these things have effects [because] people tend or hire people who they are comfortable with, who are like them,” he said.
“If an H-1B gets laid off, they have to leave the country, and that can be a devastating experience, particularly if they have a house and a family here,” Hira said. “They will be much more desperate to keep their jobs. … Those folks are so desperate they will work for nothing,” he added.
Americans “have to band together,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of USTechworkers.com, adding:
That means you have to make a collective decision to go to management and make your demands. You have to band together and meet with your legislators at municipal, country, state and federal levels. You have to do it immediately. You run the risk of getting fired, but the reality is that they are going to fire you anyway. That’s the plan … The time to fight back is now.
“You go as high up as you can, to the CEO, the director of human resources,” said James Otto, a California lawyer who has won court cases for Americans who were fired so the companies could import Indian workers. He continued:
If you don’t do this, you lose. But if you do this, the range of outcomes starts with you get to keep your jobs – maybe with less pay, but you keep your benefits. You can negotiate, and if they say no, you’ve gained documentation of discrimination and it is illegal discrimination and you can sue on that.