Orlando (Florida): Walt Disney is reported to have laid off around 250 American employees and replaced them with Indian H-1B visa holders, fuelling the deliberation in the United States about immigrants taking away jobs from the locals.
The entertainment company accordingly, informed the 250 employees in October that their jobs are to be transferred to Indian immigrants brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India. Also, the workers had to train their replacements and teach them their jobs.
“I just couldn't believe they could fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs exactly. It was also humiliating to rain somebody else to take over your job. I still can't grasp it,” a former employee said.
Disney officials say the lay-offs are a part of a re-organisation and the company will be opening more positions that it eliminated. “But the lay-offs at Disney and other companies are raising new questions about how businesses and outsourcing companies are using the temporary visas, known as H-!B, to place immigrants in technology jobs in the US.”
A professor of public policy, Ronit Hira said, “The programme has created a high lucrative business model of bringing in cheaper H-1B workers to substitute for Americans.”
These lay-offs have spurred allegations against Obama' government's immigration reforms only helpful to the immigrant workers at the cost of the Americans'.
