Another company clamors for foreign visa workers while laying off Americans

Don’t be shocked, but yet another tech company has announced mass layoffs in its American workforce, while simultaneously pressuring lawmakers to relax restrictions on foreign visa workers who can do the same jobs more cheaply.

Qualcomm recently announced an enormous upcoming slash in its U.S. workforce, projecting more than 4,000 employees will be cut in what the company describes as a “strategic realignment.”

“Qualcomm — a major producer of smartphone chips — announced last week it’s eliminating 15 percent of its workforce or about 4,500 employees, just weeks after fellow tech giant Microsoft announced a massive round of layoffs,” The Daily Caller reports.

The cuts come amid ongoing pressure from both companies, as well as others in the U.S. high-tech sector, for the government to allow more foreign H-1b visa workers into the country. The catch — that is, the aspect of this whole lobbying effort that rings so hypocritical in the eyes of unemployed Americans and conservative critics — is that the tech companies are using a bogus excuse to justify the need to import foreign labor.

The H-1b lobbying effort is centered around the idea that America has a critical dearth of domestic STEM labor — that is, highly trained American employees working in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). In order to meet the demand, they argue, Congress should widen the H-1b visa bottleneck, so that foreign workers with tech training can come and fill the natural void in the labor pool.

Yet the very companies that keep laying off their standing American STEM workforce are the same companies that try to persuade Washington, D.C. and the public that America doesn’t have enough residents who are trained and capable to fill those jobs. And in too many cases, their efforts are successful.

“There’s no evidence of any way, shape or form that there’s a shortage in the conventional sense,” Rutgers-based public policy professor Hal Salzman said late last year. “They [U.S. tech companies] may not be able to find them at the price they want. But I’m not sure that qualifies as a shortage, any more than my not being able to find a half-priced TV.

“The tech industry’s promotion of expanded temporary visas (such as the H-1B) and green cards is driven by its desire for cheap, young and immobile labor,” Salzman and others also wrote in a separate USA Today column.

“… IT industry leaders have spent lavishly on lobbying to promote their STEM shortage claims among legislators. The only problem is that the evidence contradicts their self-interested claims.”

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