Media Mislead as Visa Worker CEOs Cut Tucker Carlson’s TV Ads

Fox News host Tucker Carlson discusses 'Populism and the Right' during the National Review
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Neil Munro

Disney’s executives stopped advertising on Tucker Carlson’s television show as he repeatedly urged President Donald Trump to shut down their pipeline of H-1B visa workers into the white collar jobs that would otherwise go to Americans.

But the establishment media ignored the financial stakes behind the corporate cutoff of advertising in early May. Instead, the reporters portrayed the self-serving cuts as a woke corporate response to Carlson’s late-May criticism of the Black Lives Matter upsurge.

Disney cut funding to Carlson because they want to protect their pipeline of cheap workers, not because of Carlson’s future statements on the future Black Lives debate, said John Miano, a lawyer with the Immigration Law Reform Institute. “It was the visas,” he said.

The inflow of workers is hidden in complex federal data that says that Disney was the “Secondary Entity Business Name” on 128 requests for 232 H-1B workers that subcontractors submitted during the first nine months of 2020.

The government data is displayed by Texas resident Virgil Bierschwale, a Texas-based software programmer.

Disney’s ESPN also sought two workers, and Disney’s National Geographic unit asked for five white collar workers.

Disney also imports H-1Bs directly. The MyVisaJobs.com site displays several years of federal data that show Disney companies directly asked for roughly 40 H-1Bs each year.

The direct and indirect worker requests suggest the House of Mouse company keeps about 600 H-1Bs in good jobs that would otherwise go to Americans, including black Americans.

In 2015, the New York Times exposed a corner of Disney’s H-1B outsourcing program in 2015:

“I just couldn’t believe they could fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs exactly,” said one former worker, an American in his 40s who remains unemployed since his last day at Disney [in Orlando] on Jan. 30. “It was so humiliating to train somebody else to take over your job. I still can’t grasp it.”

Disney also imports blue collar labor for its vacation business. In July 2019, the International Labor Recruitment Working Group (ILRWG) posted a report that used Freedom of Information Act rules to show that:

Disney hired 2,355 J-1 SWT workers in 2015, a staggering number considering that Disney is also known to hire workers through a variety of other temporary work visa programs—including vocational students on M visas, intra-company transferees with L-1 visas, H-2B workers in non-agricultural jobs, trainees with H-3 visas, and treaty investors with E-2 visas—as well as having successfully lobbied for the creation of its own temporary work visa program, the Q visa. In 2015, 1,900 Q visas were issued by DOS. Although data are not available to confirm if all 1,900 were hired by Disney companies in 2015, it is likely that at least a significant share—approximately two-thirds, according to previous years— became Disney employees. According to an estimate by Professor Kit Johnson, Disney saves $19 million per year on labor costs by using the Q visa, in addition to the $15 million they save through J-1 hires.

Disney’s ABC News subsidiary rarely covers the visa worker issue and usually sides with pro-migration advocates, Miano said. “You see no critical report on H-1Bs on ABC. … If we had 100 major media outlets, ABC couldn’t get away with this,” Miano added.

In recent months, Carlson has repeatedly urged Trump to shut down many of these programs so Americans can regain jobs lost in the coronavirus crash.

The visa worker pipelines are “demented,” he said on April 1. “The biggest winners are Apple, Google, and IBM. … It has always been disgusting. … The President needs to stop this from happening,” he said:

On April 21, for example, Carlson cheered Trump’s tweet announcing a shutdown of immigration in the United States:

Americans have been consistently demanding this. And it’s measurable. A new Ipsos poll found that a remarkable 79% of all American adults support the temporary suspension of all immigration into the country for the duration of this pandemic. A Harvard-Harris poll found that 83 percent of adults  – 83 percent – want a moratorium on immigration from Mexico. And by the way, these are not new sentiments, they’ve been around a long time. Another Harvard poll from two years ago found that 81 percent of voters wanted legal immigration cut to below its current level of about a million people a year. Sixty-three percent want that number cut by half, at least.

In a country as divided as ours is right now, this is as close to a consensus as you’re ever going to find about anything ever. If our democracy is real — and we’re hoping it is — our leaders cannot continue to ignore what the public wants.

Carlson’s comments are winning enormous audiences for his show.

“Monday, June 15 Scoreboard: Tucker Carlson Had the Most-Watched Show in All of Prime-Time TV,” said Adweek.com.

“‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ was seen by 4.2 million people on Monday, making it the most-watched television program in the country that night, ahead of entertainment fare on the major networks,” said the June 18 New York Times. “His show was the highest rated on Fox News last week, and he has pulled ahead of Sean Hannity, the network’s usual ratings leader, in total viewers for June.”

But the media outlets are portraying the Disney corporate backlash as a noble statement in support of black lives.

The New York Times’ reporters followed the script on June 18:

In recent weeks, Tucker Carlson, the conservative Fox News host, has challenged the Black Lives Matter movement, dismissed demonstrators as “criminal mobs,” accused a Texas police chief of “sounding more like a therapist than a cop” and mocked a CNN children’s special about racism that featured Elmo, the “Sesame Street” puppet.

His comments have generated a harsh backlash. Critics have called Mr. Carlson’s on-air monologues incendiary and accused him of making racist remarks. Major advertisers, including the Walt Disney Company and Sandals, the vacation resorts, have fled, requesting that Fox News remove their ads from Mr. Carlson’s 8 p.m. hour.

Deadline.com reported June 10:

Both Disney and T-Mobile have cut ties with the primetime Tucker Carlson Tonight over the host’s polarizing point of view on the Black Lives Matter movement and the desire for justice and equality in America that many of its members advocate.
…

“The [Disney] ABC advertisements were placed on the show without our knowledge by third party media buyers who were unaware that we do not advertise on the show, and they have now been notified not to place any further ads,” an ABC spokesperson told Deadline tonight.)

The two reports did not say when Disney and ABC executives decided to stop advertising on Carlson’s show.

“The advertisers that publicly pulled were not currently running in the program” when Carlson made the BLM statements, one source told Breitbart News.

T-Mobile cut Carlson’s ads in late May — after Carlson’s focus on the visa programs and before the Black Lives Matter upsurge:

“We haven’t run ads on Tucker Carlson Tonight since early May and have canceled all future placements. … We will continue to support those who stand against racial injustice,” Deadline.com reported.

Bierschwale’s site also reveals T-Mobile’s 2020 supply of roughly 550 contractor-supplied H-1Bs.

The indirect inflow is added to T-Mobile’s direct request for at least 190 H-1Bs. The numbers suggest that T-Mobile employs at least 900 H-1Bs instead of Americans, including young blacks individuals  who are supposedly championed by groups such as the National Urban League:

While it imports Asian workers, T-Mobile has posed as a champion of Black Lives Matter. A June 17 post to employees, titled “At T-Mobile, Your Fight Is Our Fight,” said:

on social media, we’re suggesting that the brand and employees alike focus on amplifying Black voices. Internally, we are encouraging strong and healthy conversations, both in large meetings and small groups — to hear feedback from Black employees on what more we can all do.

Neither Disney nor T-Mobile responded to emails from Breitbart News.

The many visa programs keep roughly 1.3 million legal foreign contract workers in jobs that can be accomplished by Americans.

The corporate hiring is exempt from government enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, even though the companies import blocks of mostly male Asian workers for jobs needed by American men and women, by whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians.

The companies are “kneeling to Black Lives Matter, but they are turning blacks down for jobs,” said Jay Palmer, an immigration and civil rights consultant. “Big tech companies throw money at BLM, but they should be offering jobs to my black brothers and sisters,” he said.

Every worker imported by Disney and other Fortune 500 companies means one less job at Disney for diverse American graduates and blue collars — including black, Asian Latino, and white graduates.

But every imported worker gives corporate executives more control over their workforce — and more profits for shareholders.

The imported H-1B workers are compliant because they have almost no workplace rights and cannot search for another job unless their corporate managers agree. They have no legal defense if their bosses decide to send them home to India or China.

The workers are also subordinate because they got their contract jobs via their Indian and Chinese workplace cultures, which do not champion U.S.-style independent professionalism:

The imported workers are profitable because they are usually — but not always — somewhat cheaper than American professionals, according to numerous U.S. and Indian studies.

For example, Disney’s population of 232 workers includes 39 who are being paid less than $80,000. The first request from Disney in fiscal 2020 came on October 13 for a $66,000 “Computer Specialist / Testing and Quality Analyst.” The cheapest worker is a $60,000 “project manager” for Disney’s Orlando office, which is being supplied by CapGemini America Inc.

But the pay numbers are misleading because the cash does not go directly to the imported workers. Instead, the claimed pay is the annual fee paid to the contractors, who then take 20 percent off the top. In some contracts, the H-1B workers are subcontracted through other companies,  allowing the executives at several companies to receive shares of the H-1B salaries.

Also, Indian H-1Bs are usually required to pay kickbacks to their staffing company managers, further shrinking their apparent income.

A whirl of staffing companies supplies the H-1Bs to Disney. They include famous names such as Accenture, Ernst & Young U.S., Capgemini America, HCL America, and Cognizant, as well as unfamiliar names, such as Birlasoft or Xoriant. Most of the firms are run by Indian managers and use imported Indian workers.

The H-1B data includes several quirks. An imported “User Support Specialist” from HCL America is to be paid $103,500, even though the prevailing wage rules allow the company to pay just $59,280. One software engineer is being delivered by Xoriant Corp. for $920,000, far above the prevailing wage of $91,686.

Most of Disney’s H-1B contractors are slated to work in Florida, at Lake Buena Vista, Orlando, and Celebration. But they are also slated for jobs in Burbank, Anaheim, and Glendale, California.

The money data, moreover, does not say anything about the productivity of U.S. or foreign employees:

Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC, or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com.

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