Intel announced that it will layoff 12,000 American workers after requesting 14,523 H-1B visas and green cards to import foreign workers. The company said the layoffs are part of a "restructuring" plan to move the company's focus to mobile devices, yet only American workers will be affected.
Intel requested 8,351 H-1B visas and 5,172 permanent green cards for foreign workers between 2010-2015, citing that they could not find enough skilled American workers. Now that many of Intel's requests have been approved the company plans a massive layoff of American employees.
Intel follows a national trend by many technology companies such as Disney and Abbot Laboratories to use visas like the H-1B visa to import cheaper labor instead of hiring American workers. In some cases, the employees were forced to train their replacements in order to receive their severance pay.
Intel was one of the technology companies involved in the 2013 Gang of Eight bill that promoted increasing the H-1B visa caps.
A 2011 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office exposed how the H-1B visa was being exploited and showed that there was very little oversight of the program. According to the report the government doesn't even know how many workers are actually in the U.S. on H-1B visas at any given time.
Read more on this story at Breitbart.com.
