The New Observer
March 7, 2016
The endorsement of Donald Trump by two former Walt Disney World employees, who say they lost their jobs and were forced to train their H1-B visa foreign replacements, has brought into sharp focus how this capitalist establishment scam works.
The two former employees—Dena Moore and Leo Perrero—appeared at a weekend Trump rally in Orlando, where they endorsed Trump and said that they had been betrayed by Trump rival and Florida senator Marco Rubio.
Leo Perrero and Dena Moore.
The two former technology employees at Walt Disney World are suing Disney and the outsourcing companies they say colluded to break the law and replace workers with cheaper immigrant labor.
Perrero and Moore say their pleas for help to their home-state senator went unanswered. Perrero told the rally that Rubio had “betrayed American workers” because he wants to expand the H1-B visa program. Rubio supports raising the number of immigrants through the H1-B visa program from 65,000 to 110,000 annually.
A recent article in the New York Times provided background to the lawsuit against Disney, and of how the H1-B “skilled visa” scam works.
Perrero, along with two hundred and fifty others, was laid off a year ago from his technology job at Walt Disney World in Orlando, and spent his final months there training a temporary immigrant from India to do his work.
He and Moore have filed lawsuits in federal court in Tampa against Disney and two global consulting companies, HCL and Cognizant, which brought in foreign workers who replaced them. They claim the companies colluded to break the law by using temporary H-1B visas to bring in immigrant workers, knowing that Americans would be displaced.
Moore, 53, who had worked at Disney for 10 years, said she had been unable to find work since being laid off—and had been forced to endure the humiliation of training her Indian replacement. After she was laid off, she applied for more than 150 other jobs at Disney. She did not get one.
A furor over the layoffs in Orlando last January brought to light many other episodes in which American workers, mainly in technology but also in accounting and administration, said they had lost jobs to foreigners on H-1B visas, and had to train replacements as a condition of their severance.
The foreign workers, mostly from India, were provided by outsourcing companies, including the two named in the lawsuits, which have dominated the H-1B visa system, packing the application process to win an outsize share of the quota set by Congress of 85,000 visas each year.
H-1B visas were created by Congress supposedly to “bring foreign workers with special skills” into the country, but have just turned into yet another path to legal immigration for nonwhites, who are not even “skilled” as the facts of the latest lawsuits have shown.
Employers are required to declare to the Department of Labor that hiring foreigners on the visas “will not adversely affect the working conditions of US workers similarly employed.”
“Was I negatively affected?” Moore asked. “Yeah, I was. I lost my job.”