Intel Lays Off American Workers While Lobbying for More H1B Visas

AP Photo/Laura Rauch
AP Photo/Laura Rauch

Intel, one of the nations largest technology corporations, has delivered a stern message to their workers: You’re not good enough.

During an internal meeting last week, the multi-billion dollar company’s CEO Brian Krzanich said Intel would be more vigorously implementing a policy he suggests has been in place for years and which has resulted in the laying off of hoards of American workers.

According to Business Insider, Intel employees have been laid off based on a policy which evaluates “the level of performance-based stock grants they received” from last year, as opposed to its standard annual-review-based layoff process. Krzanich reportedly described this policy to irate, devoted employees as being “the way a meritocracy works.” He also told them that they should “[e]xpect that in the future we’ll probably do similar types of things.”

The company is complicit in laying off American workers from their posts while advocating for an increase in H1B visa workers. Once an employee is laid off, they are never eligible for rehire at Intel again, which Business Insider notes is a policy most workers are not aware of.

This past March, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, slammed Intel for seeking to replace American workers the technology company laid off last year with cheaper foreign H1B visa holders. Often times, these STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and IT workers are forced to train their replacements before being laid off.

Meanwhile, Sessions noted at the start of this month that IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Oracle have a combined 10,000 job openings in the United States.

According to a report by CNN Money, Intel was projected to trim close to 5 percent of its 107,600 global workforce by the end of 2014—5,380 jobs. Krzanich had reportedly sent an internal email to employees last month warning them that Intel would be implementing a restructuring plan that would result in the loss of many jobs again. Business Insider notes that, while he didn’t specify any numbers, a report by The Oregonian suggests that it would amount to roughly 3 percent of the 106,000 workers it currently employs worldwide.

Intel has endorsed the I-Squared bill, which was introduced in January of this year by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT). The I-Squared bill seeks to increase the caps on the number of H1B visas allowed in this country by tripling that number. 

Intel is among the top five technology companies, including Microsoft and Facebook that has lobbied for comprehensive immigration reform in addition to pushing lawmakers to support these increases.

Ron Hira, a public policy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, is among a number of experts who have worked on these issues for several years only to prove time and again that the laying off of American workers at these corporations is to supplant American jobs with cheaper labor who then leave after several years. Once their visas expire, these H1B workers are merely replaced again with a slew of newly-minted H1B visa-wielding workers.

The replacement of American workers with foreign labor is a largely bipartisan issue, although there is a split in the Republican Party over whether to support calls for increases to what is largely seen as a war on the American worker.

2016 presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio are among Republican Party members to push for increases in the H1B visas program. Fellow Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker has stated that he is for legal immigration into this country and does not support President Obama’s executive amnesty. Hopefully he will someday weigh in on his thoughts regarding attempts to increases the caps on America’s H1B visa program.

Follow Adelle Nazarian on Twitter @AdelleNaz and on Facebook.

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