Intel lays off 12,000 after importing 14,523 foreigners

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Intel lays of 12,000 after seeking Visas to import 14,523 foreign professionals since 2010.

Technology giant Intel announced April 19 it will fire 12,000 skilled U.S.-based professionals — after already swelling its workforce with 14,523 requests in Washington D.C. since 2010 for visas to import foreign professionals through the controversial H-1B and Green Card programs.

The company said the layoffs were part of a restructuring plan to help shift its focus from desktop PCs to mobile devices. But the company is very profitable, and first-quarter 2016 profits were 14 percent above predictions.

Amid the layoffs, Intel is one of the nation’s largest users of the H-1B outsourcing program which allows companies such as Disney and Abbot Laboratories to replace white-collar American professionals with cheaper professionals from India, China, and other countries.

Intel has insisted that it cannot find enough skilled American workers to fill its needs. From 2010 to 2015, it filed requests for up to 8,351 H-1B visas, plus 5,172 applications for permanent Green Cards for its foreign employees, according to MyVisasJobs.com. That data shows the company sought to hire 14,523 foreign professionals instead of many Americans eager to work at Intel.

The MyVisaJobs.com site, which presents data prepared by government agencies, also shows that the company even sought work visas for 445 people who arrived in the country as students carrying F-1 visas.

The number of foreign professionals hired is uncertain. However, the MyVisaJobs.com data shows that 2,654 Green Card requests were approved in the five years between 2015 and 2011. Also many of the H-1B requests were made when the economy was stalled, and so many were likely granted. If one-third of its H-1B visa-requests were granted, then Intel was able to hire 3,000 H-1B workers from 2010 to 2015.

Intel’s press aides declined to respond to calls and emails from Breitbart.

Intel’s hires are not lower-status “tech workers,” such as software-testers or software-maintenance programmers. Instead, Intel imported foreign college-graduates for prestigious jobs such as electronics engineers, industrial engineers or computer and information research scientists. These H-1B workers can stay for six years, or longer, and some get Green Cards, which grant lifetime work permits.

There’s no shortage of U.S. engineers looking for jobs at Intel.

The U.S. marketplace includes many Americans — often older and experienced, but who ask for higher wages to pay for their families — who are eager to work at Intel’s outsourced jobs. For example, on April 21, Indeed.com offered resumes of 16,576 people seeking jobs as electronics engineers in Santa Clara, Calif., the company’s home town. They included Robert Hill of Cupertino, Calif., Ray Chen in San Mateo, Calif., and Aubrey Calder in Mountain View., Calif.

Nationwide, companies and universities employ roughly 800,000 lower salary white collar guest workers. That total is roughly equivalent to the number of Americans who graduate each year with degrees in business, medicine, technology, computers, and architecture. The resident population of white collar guest-workers includes roughly 100,000 lower wage professors, doctors, scientist and other professionals employed by U.S. universities and their affiliated business partners. These guest-workers help lower first-year salaries for American graduates, so lowering the Americans’ lifetime earnings.

The H-1B visa program isn’t the only program used to import foreign workers into the country. Late last year the Obama administration expended the Optional Practical Training (OPT) visa program, which is allowing 120,000 foreign students to work with companies, many of whom rely on the universities for hires.

Because of corruption, agencies are trying to crack down on fake universities that import foreign fake students for work at U.S. companies, and companies that use the H-1B system to get foreign workers for rent to American companies.

Intel’s critics say Intel has used illegal methods to reduce white-collar salaries in California’s Silicon Valley. Intel was a defendant in a 2011 class action lawsuit filed against a group of tech companies, including Apple and Google. The lawsuit was settled in 2015 for $415 million.

For its part, Intel claims that the H-1B visa program is a good thing for the country and, according to Intel spokesperson Lisa Malloy, “sustains our national competitiveness, drives economic growth, and creates jobs in the process.”

Along with other companies, such as Microsoft and Qualcomm, Intel was part of the group of business giants that allied with Democrats and with Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) to pressure GOP politicians to accept the 2013 “Gang of Eight” immigration bill. The unpopular bill, which included a huge increase in the importation of immigrants and H-1B guest workers, as well as a blanket amnesty for millions of illegals already here, failed when GOP voters ejected GOP House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor, in his June 2014 primary election.

Since then, political outsider Donald Trump has put himself on track to the GOP’s 2016 nomination by promising to reform the nation’s immigration and guest worker systems to help Americans. For example, he has said he would reduce the inflow of H-1Bs by raising the minimum wage for H-1B workers, and has called for one year “pause” in legal immigration. Trump’s main rival, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), has also called for a pro-American reform of the labor market, saying it will drive up Americans’ wages and spur technology development.

Their failed GOP rivals — including Gov. Jeb Bush and Gov. Marco Rubio — declined to call for pro-American immigration reform. In fact, Bush’s economic platform called for increased outsourcing of U.S. jobs to imported foreign professionals.

Currently, four million Americans turn 18 each year, and the nation’s government annually imports roughly one million new legal immigrants and workers, plus hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants and roughly 700,000 temporary guest workers, including the six-year H-1B professionals. In 2013, the inflow of foreign labor helped reduce wages and boosted the stock market.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government ... ince-2010/

There's a misconception that skilled labor isn't harmed by illegal and mass immigration. Perhaps those that read this will reconsider their view.

[_I have a question]

America is actually governed by Wall Street, not Washington isn't it...

A terrible message from Intel.

[_cinepro]

But didn't those immigrants pay taxes? So, it was a net gain for the US economy.

Take this anti-immigrant claptrap elsewhere.

[_ajax18]

But didn't those immigrants pay taxes? So, it was a net gain for the US economy.

Take this anti-immigrant claptrap elsewhere.

It was a huge loss for the American middle class worker. The only people helped by this were the 1% big business owners. Would you really be able to live on a wage that resulted from no protectionism from people coming from a 3rd world country standard of living?

I guess you're an owner so you've never had to consider this. Cheap labor benefits you directly regardless of where it comes from. Most of us will never be able to afford to build a business and we depend on these kind of jobs to retain any hope of maintaining an American standard of living. It's not anti immigrant. It's pro American and putting our own people first. It's about loyalty to each other as countrymen and a nation, something you obviously do not espouse.

[_Brackite]

It's pro American and putting our own people first. It's about loyalty to each other as countrymen and a nation, something you obviously do not espouse.

I thought that cinepro was being a bit sarcastic here.

[_ajax18]

It's pro American and putting our own people first. It's about loyalty to each other as countrymen and a nation, something you obviously do not espouse.

I thought that cinepro was being a bit sarcastic here.

I'm still confused as to what Cinepro's opinion is on the issue.

[_Kevin Graham]

There's a misconception that skilled labor isn't harmed by illegal and mass immigration.

There is nothing in your stupid Brietfart piece that shows skilled labor is harmed by illegal immigration . What harms skilled labor is legal immigration guided by corporate America. No one coming here illegally is going to put a doctor, an engineer or a computer programmer out of a job. Nor will their presence drive down their wages.

[_Kevin Graham]

Illegal Immigrants Don't Lower Our Wages Or Take Our Jobs

"Nowhere will you find a tradeoff where one additional immigrant means that one American loses a job in the economy," said Cato's Alex Nowrasteh. "Immigrants either lower the wages of some American workers by about 2% or raise them by about 2% in a dynamic economy."

[_Kevin Graham]

Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant

Most anti-immigration arguments I hear are variations on the Lump of Labor Fallacy. That immigrant has a job. If he didn’t have that job, somebody else, somebody born here, would have it. This argument is wrong, or at least wildly oversimplified. But it feels so correct, so logical. And it’s not just people like my grandfather making that argument. Our government policy is rooted in it.

The single greatest bit of evidence disproving the Lump of Labor idea comes from research about the Mariel boatlift, a mass migration in 1980 that brought more than 125,000 Cubans to the United States. According to David Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, roughly 45,000 of them were of working age and moved to Miami; in four months, the city’s labor supply increased by 7 percent. Card found that for people already working in Miami, this sudden influx had no measurable impact on wages or employment. His paper was the most important of a series of revolutionary studies that transformed how economists think about immigration. Before, standard economic models held that immigrants cause long-term benefits, but at the cost of short-term pain in the form of lower wages and greater unemployment for natives. But most economists now believe that Card’s findings were correct: Immigrants bring long-term benefits at no measurable short-term cost. (Borjas, that lone dissenting voice, agrees about the long-term benefits, but he argues that other economists fail to see painful short-term costs, especially for the poor.)

Economists have shifted to studying how nations so quickly adjust to new arrivals. The leading scholar on this today is Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis, who has shown that immigrants tend to complement — rather than compete against — the existing work force. Take a construction site: Typically, Peri has found, immigrants with limited education perform many support tasks (moving heavy things, pouring cement, sweeping, painting), while citizens with more education focus on skilled work like carpentry, plumbing and electrical installation, as well as customer relations. The skilled native is able to focus on the most valuable tasks, while the immigrants help bring the price down for the overall project (it costs a lot to pay a highly trained carpenter to sweep up a work site). Peri argues, with strong evidence, that there are more native-born skilled craftspeople working today, not fewer, because of all those undocumented construction workers. A similar dynamic is at play on Wall Street. Many technical-support tasks are dominated by recent immigrants, while sales, marketing, advising and trading, which require cultural and linguistic fluency, are typically the domain of the native-born. (Whether Wall Street’s technical wizards have, on balance, helped or hurt the economy is a question for another day.)

This paradox of immigration is bound up with the paradox of economic growth itself. Growth has acquired a bad reputation of late among some, especially on the left, who associate the term with environmental destruction and rising inequality. But growth through immigration is growth with remarkably little downside. Whenever an immigrant enters the United States, the world becomes a bit richer. For all our faults, the United States is still far better developed economically than most nations, certainly the ones that most of our immigrants have left. Our legal system and our financial and physical infrastructure are also far superior to most (as surprising as that might sometimes seem to us). So when people leave developing economies and set foot on American soil, they typically become more productive, in economic terms. They earn more money, achieve a higher standard of living and add more economic value to the world than they would have if they stayed home. If largely open borders were to replace our expensive and restrictive lottery system, it’s likely that many of these immigrants would travel back and forth between the United States and their native countries, counteracting the potential brain drain by sharing knowledge and investment capital. Environmentally, immigration tends to be less damaging than other forms of growth, because it doesn’t add to the number of people on earth and often shifts people to more environmentally friendly jurisdictions.

To me, immigration is the greatest example of our faulty thinking, a shortsightedness that hurts others while simultaneously hurting ourselves. The State Department issues fewer than half a million immigrant visas each year. Using the 7 percent figure from the Mariel boatlift research, it’s possible that we could absorb as many as 11 million immigrants annually. But if that’s politically untenable, what about doubling the visas we issue each year? It would still be fewer than a million, or less than 0.7 percent of the work force. If that didn’t go too badly, we could double it again the next year. The data are clear. We would be better off. In fact, the world would be better off.

Whenever I’m tempted by the notion that humans are rational beings, carefully evaluating the world and acting in ways that maximize our happiness, I think of our meager immigration policies. For me, it’s close to proof that we are, collectively, still jealous, nervous creatures, hoarding what we have, afraid of taking even the most promising risk, displaying loyalty to our own tribe while we stare, suspiciously, at everyone else. It’s nice to believe that I am part of a more mature, rational generation, that my grandfather’s old ways of thinking are dying away. But I’m not so sure. We might be a lot more like him than we want to think.

[_ajax18]

Peri argues, with strong evidence, that there are more native-born skilled craftspeople working today, not fewer, because of all those undocumented construction workers.

Like your uncle finishing sheet rock, who you blame for not being able to come up with the money to retrain himself in a different profession, since his has been taken over by cheap foreign labor? Foreigners want to come to America to achieve a better life for themselves, which is understandable. Big business owners want to bring them in because it helps their bottom line as well. The only problem is that in a democracy a lot of voters possess the common sense that this is very bad news for their standard of living. So big money pays people to come up with these idiotic statistics to try to get the middle class to embrace their own demise. For the most part, they're succeeding.