Intel Lays Off 12,000 People After Lobbying For More Foreign Workers

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One of the top users of foreign workers imported via the H-1B visa program announced Tuesday it’s laying off about ten percent of its global workforce.

Tech giant Intel is laying off some 12,000 workers, although it’s one of the country’s 15 largest users of H-1Bs, which are temporary visas that allow companies to hire foreign workers for American tech jobs. The big-time layoffs come even as the company has called for hikes in the number of foreign workers it is able to hire using H-1B visas.

The chip-making giant said the mass firings are part of a “restructuring initiative” that will further its shift away from the PC business toward smart devices and cloud-based computing.

But the firings stand out in light of Intel’s lobbying to expand the H-1B visa program. In 2013, the company’s government affairs managers complained that Intel simply can’t find enough homegrown workers in technical fields to meet its needs. And in 2014, the company called for allowing the spouses and children of H-1B recipients to automatically qualify for work in the U.S. as well.

This has to stop

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It would help if the US stopped subsidizing (via state and federal direct grants, and low interest student loans) useless college degrees like “Gender Studies” on an equal level to degrees that are actually useful to society, like engineering, the sciences, medicine etc.

Put simply, if you want to study Renaissance Art History, you should pay the entire cost, say $40K per year. The taxpayers won’t support you. But if you want to study electrical engineering, you get the full benefit of state and federal assistance, direct or indirect. So maybe you pay only $10K per year.

Let’s see here, 12,000 layoffs. According to the BLS that should come out to around 50,000 added jobs. Expect another rosy jobs report for whatever month those layoffs take effect.

@Dreadnought, #1:

Importing foreign tech workers was always about holding down skill labor costs, not about any real shortage of available domestic tech workers. It was a temporary means of increasing corporate profit margins.

You possibly consider Breitbart a more credible source than I do. The following is from a 2014 article that appeared on Breitbart:

“Despite the clamor that there is a perpetual shortage of American high-tech workers, the number of foreign workers with STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) degrees that the United States imports annually alone exceeds the number of available STEM jobs, making it tougher for Americans to move up the economic ladder by getting good-paying jobs in those professions.

“A Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) report released on Tuesday ahead of a panel on the subject at the National Press Club found that from 2007-2012, STEM employment averaged “averaged only 105,000 jobs annually” while the U.S. admitted about 129,000 immigrants with STEM degrees. That means “the number of new immigrants with STEM degrees admitted each year is by itself higher than the total growth in STEM employment.” During that time period, the number of U.S.-born STEM graduates grew by an average of 115,00 a year.”

It’s all part of a systemic dysfunction in the economy that has to do with the upward reallocation of income and wealth, and the dispersion of the negative consequences downward and across the lower economic levels—with “lower” being broadly defined as “not anywhere up toward the top.” Private wealth concentrates as public debt grows. There’s a correlation that is strongly suggestive of causation.