Elon Musk, Tech CEOs, Fire Liberal Americans, but Few Foreign Workers

Elon Musk
Hannibal Hanschke-Pool/Getty Images
Neil Munro

Elon Musk and other Fortune 500 CEOs are firing thousands of U.S. tech employees — but are reportedly keeping thousands of cheap temporary workers who have been imported from India and China.

“There’s going to be [national origin] discrimination lawsuits against all these companies because they’re violating the civil rights of American professionals,” said Jay Palmer, an Alabama-based immigration and human trafficking expert. He added;

I’ve had 10 people contact me about a possible class action lawsuit … [because the CEOs] aren’t firing the H-1Bs. They’re firing the upper echelon managers and the Americans, and they’re keeping the H-1Bs in order to keep the costs down.

The news about American graduates losing their Fortune 500 jobs to foreign visa workers is a potential political problem for the Democratic Party.  The liberal graduates are needed to offset the GOP’s populist wave of blue-collar workers who have been alienated by cheap labor migration, rising crime, and painful inflation.

“The [political] question is ‘Do the [Biden-voting] graduates know that they’re being replaced, or that are not getting jobs because of the foreign workers that [President Joe Biden] is bringing in?'” said Rosemary Jenks, the director of government relations for NumbersUSA.

“I think Democrats are assuming that they don’t know,” she added.

Most — certainly not all — GOP leaders are content to let the CEOs hire visa workers in place of the very liberal U.S. tech graduates.

The displacement is being spotlighted by Twitter’s Elon Musk, who is firing almost 4,000 workers — or one-in-two Twitter employees — in the U.S. and overseas. Most of the purged workers are Americans — but some of his H-1B employees are getting fired:

The federal government rewards CEOs for keeping their cliquish and self-serving H-1B visa workers from India, China, and other countries.

“There are approximately 625 to 670 Twitter employees in H-1B status,” said a report in Forbes.com by a business-backed advocate, which described a long list of reasons for discarding the Americans before the visa workers:

Employers should be aware that laying off employees in H-1B status carries additional rules to follow. “When an employer lays off an H-1B visa holder, three obligations are triggered,” William Stock of Klasko Immigration Law Partners said in an interview via email.

…

Kevin Miner, a partner with Fragomen, notes additional considerations for employers. “Whenever there is an involuntary termination, the employer has to offer to pay the one-way air transportation for the worker to their home country or last country of permanent residence.”

A report by MyVisaJobs.com showed that Twitter asked the federal government for 388 H-1B workers in 2022, and 1,118 H-1B workers in the prior three years. Roughly one-third of those workers are approved. The company has also nominated almost 200 foreigners for valuable green cards in exchange for their prior work.

Firing visa workers reduces the overall pool of workers available for the Fortune 500, the Forbes article noted. Fired visa workers are supposed to go home if they cannot get a replacement job within sixty days, or also give up their quest for green cards, the article suggested.

In reality, many H-1B workers get hired by other American companies or get different work permits via the no-limits Optional Practical Training Program. They can get also sweatshop jobs in the pyramids of foreign-owned subcontractors that lease cheap tech workers to Fortune 500 companies.

“Anyone who has gone to college to find employment in this field should be voting against the Democratic Party and voting for an American-first agenda,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers.  “The Democratic Party is pushing open borders and bringing in people that literally push out [Americans] from higher skilled jobs,” he said.

President Joe Biden’s immigration deputy is Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Mayorkas is a pro-migration zealot best known for inviting roughly 3 million blue-collar migrants through the southern U.S. border. His invitation has killed thousands of migrants and helped to wreck the Democrats’ poll ratings in 2022.

But Mayorkas has also delivered a huge inflow of foreign graduates into the careers needed by U.S. white-collar graduates.

Since early 2021, Mayorkas has shuttered pro-American reforms set by President Donald Trump, opened new routes for visa workers to take Americans’ jobs, and lengthened work permits for more foreign graduates of U.S. universities.

He lobbied to dramatically increase the inflow of visa workers, has also won a lawsuit that gives the White House seemingly unlimited authority to grant work permits to migrants who enroll in U.S. universities, and worked with the State Department to accelerate the flow of foreign workers.

Mayorkas has also shut down enforcement measures, dropped penalties for visa fraud, reduced deportations, and opened the door for foreign workers to take jobs after getting tourist visas. The resulting inflow of foreign workers has suppressed salaries paid to U.S. graduates, even as their housing costs spike and inflation erodes their consumer spending.

Mayorkas’ support for Fortune 500 companies gives a free hand to their investors and CEOs, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

The Wall Street Journal reported on November 7:

[Zuckerberg announced]  in September that Meta was planning to cut expenses by at least 10% in the coming months, in part through staff reductions. The cuts expected to be announced this week follow several months of more targeted staffing reductions in which employees were managed out or saw their roles eliminated.

“Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Mr. Zuckerberg told employees at a companywide meeting at the end of June.

Facebook has thousands of foreign workers. In October, Facebook accepted a small fine after the federal government showed widespread hiring discrimination against American graduates.

“One guy called me [from Facebook] and he told me that he and [several] others got laid off,” said Palmer, who works with migrants seeking legal status, and with lawyers who sue companies on behalf of victimized Americans.  “All of them are American citizens — even two Indian [immigrants] who are American citizens got laid off — the only people they kept were the [foreign] H-1Bs,” he said.

Similarly, the Irish-born CEO of Stripe, Patrick Collison announced he would be “reducing the size of our team by around 14%.” Stripe has approximately 300 to 350 H-1B workers, according to Forbes.

As tech CEOs discard their Democrat-voting professionals, many polls show Democrats need the voters of those professionals.

For example, white collars split 58 percent for Democrats and 37 percent for the GOP, while blue collars split 49 percent for the GOP and 40 percent for the Democrats, according to a September poll by the New York Times. Those numbers add up to a 30-point gap between the parties and the two classes.

On immigration issues, college graduates backed the Democrats over Republicans by 2o points — 56 percent to 36 percent — while blue collars backed the GOP over Democrats by 48 percent to 38 percent. Those numbers add up to another 30-point class gap between the two parties.

Nationwide, there are at least 1.5 million visa workers in white-collar jobs around the United States. This “Greencard Workforce” is cheap because the workers are paid low salaries and the hope of winning the huge deferred bonus of U.S. green cards.

These workers hold jobs with their H-1B visas, or with L-1, J-1, OPT, or H4EAD documents. But many work illegally after arriving with B-1/B-2 tourist visas.

This huge disposable workforce is valuable for the Fortune 500 because it allows managers to quickly hire and fire blocs of cheap subcontract workers. The pyramids of contractors are especially profitable because layers of managers can skim and share much of their foreign workers’ salaries.

Fortune 500 companies can import H-1Bs and pay them lower salaries posting them to lower-wage cities, such as Fargo, North Dakota.

The workforce policy also trains many foreign graduates, so helping U.S. investors to move white-collar jobs to low-wage India, China, and other countries.

The visa workforce also allows CEOs to sideline American professionals who demand more attention be paid to products’ security, privacy, reliability, and compliance with federal law.

The green card workforce also minimizes the career development of skilled American professionals who may launch new technologies and services that take revenue from existing Fortune 500 companies.

The bottom-line benefits of the visa workers are multiplied 20-fold in the stock market. Stock values — and executive bonuses — are inflated when stock-pickers are confident that companies’ labor costs remain low. In 2020, for example, advocates complained that Trump’s temporary bar against the inflow of new visa workers had chopped $100 billion off Fortune 500 stock values.

But the CEO’s eagerness to sideline American professionals has hidden costs.

For example, the exclusion of American professionals reduces the companies’ focus on long-term research, quality, security, accuracy, and safety. “It’s all upside to the corporations in the short run because the goal is to improve earnings per share,” said Lynn. “In the long run, it hurts innovation, it hurts productivity, [workplace] security, and national security,” he added.

That workplace shift deeply damaged companies such as Intel, Boeing, and Theranos.

The replacement is happening in a very wide variety of jobs needed by American graduates, including in science, Silicon Valley, journalism, fashion, and healthcare.

Visa workers cannot be professionals because they are not free to switch jobs, but are indentured to their cliques’ shared campaign to get green cards, said Lynn:

When you have a clique within your company, you open up opportunities for fraud, waste, and abuse … What you want is a well-integrated workforce free of cliques. What we have seen time and time again, is that when H-1Bs — particularly, H-1Bs from India — become more than a third of the workers in a company, you have a clique without transparency into day-to-day operations … You want to make sure that your workers share your interests, and you’re going to get that with the citizen professionals, and you’re going to have a more diverse and more interesting workplace.

Musk should ensure his “the interests of his workers should be congruent with his goal of democratizing journalism and empowering people — and you can’t do that when your workers are indentured servants,” said Lynn.

Corporate officials say H-1B workers are needed to fill empty slots. But that the claims of a shortage are debunked by data showing that tech workers’ salaries have remained flat for years.

Dice.com collects data on technology workers’ salaries. In 2019, the site showed that U.S. tech workers’ wages had dropped in value from 2009 to 2018 because inflation had exceeded the wage gains. The salaries had risen from $78,845 in 2009 to $93,244 in 2018, slightly below the inflation rate.

And a 2021 study by the Census Bureau reported:

The vast majority (62%) of [American] college-educated workers who majored in a STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] field were employed in non-STEM fields such as non-STEM management, law, education, social work, accounting or counseling. In addition, 10% of STEM college graduates worked in STEM-related occupations such as health care.

The path to STEM jobs for non-STEM majors was narrow. Only a few STEM-related majors (7%) and non-STEM majors (6%) ultimately ended up in STEM occupations.

Many U.S. journalists help to hide the green card workforce from their own families, peers, and relatives by focusing their emotions on the preferences of migrants.

Also, most — but not all — U.S. professionals are cowed by the establishment’s claim that they must live in a “Nation of Immigrants.”

But some Americans are fighting back with lawsuits that show how hands-off U.S. CEOs allow foreign-born managers to corruptly sell skilled Americans’ jobs and careers to eager visa workers.

“I have seen the system in the backend, and it is so appalling to see that there is so much [resume] forgery being done, there’s so much of corruption being done, that it is almost to the level back in India,” Aabha, an Indian in North Carolina, told Breitbart News in November 2021.

Aabha continued:

I have met so many [American] people who are graduates and so much more knowledgeable than the Indians that I see in my regular [work]day — and they are [saying] like “Okay, because we are not experienced, we are not getting [technology] jobs.” So they decide to do a blue collar job. They’re walking into Walmart, they’re walking into Best Buy. And these Indians, the team that I work with, they cannot even speak a single sentence in English without making any mistakes.

Indian-run subcontractors and visa workers can forge resumes and technical credentials because U.S. employers “do not really do background verification unless and until they hire you as a full-time employee,” Aabha said, adding:

Just in case the [U.S.] employers need to check, the [Indian subcontractors] create one small office in India, they take a rental apartment in India, they put poor people there, they [instruct them to say]  “If you get any calls, tell them that this person has experience.” That it. It’s as simple as that.

Indian managers also duplicate the DHS’s H-1B visas to import additional, kickback-paying Indian workers, Aabha said:

They have been doing it openly and it’s all Indians, only Indians, because they are so desperate to move to the states. They’re so desperate to leave their country because they know they cannot work there. They know that they’re not going make so much money as they do here.

Once hired at U.S. wage rates, untrained Indian software workers pay qualified Indians in India to do the actual work on their U.S. computer at Indian wage rates, regardless of U.S. privacy and secrecy laws, Aabha said:

I’ve seen people working [for the] Bank of America [as] they take support from India. I’ve seen people working [for] Wells Fargo taking support from India …The person there in India will guide [them] via Zoom or by via video call and they will get the work done.

Many government reports, lawsuits, and articles say that India’s workplace culture is far more distrustful and grasping than Americans’ ideal of high-trust, dispassionate professionalism. Breitbart News has covered these developments here, here,  here, here, and here.

But the imported Indian workplace culture is increasingly dominant in U.S. Fortune 500 companies, in part, because it matches the ruthless worldview of Wall Street investors, another U.S worker told Breitbart News.

“The fact of the matter is, the people on Wall Street don’t care — they want the bottom line,” he said.

“This corporatocracy has chosen not to invest in Americans and America, but rather to exploit Americans and in the long run, to bring great harm to America,” said Lynn.

 

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