ORLANDO, Fla. — The employees who kept the data systems humming in the vast Walt Disney fantasy fief did not suspect trouble when they were suddenly summoned to meetings with their boss.
While families rode the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train and searched for Nemo on clamobiles in the theme parks, these workers monitored computers in industrial buildings nearby, making sure millions of Walt Disney World ticket sales, store purchases and hotel reservations went through without a hitch. Some were performing so well that they thought they had been called in for bonuses.
Instead, about 250 Disney employees were told in late October that they would be laid off. Many of their jobs were transferred to immigrants on temporary visas for highly skilled technical workers, who were brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India. Over the next three months, some Disney employees were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had lost.
“I just couldn’t believe they could fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs exactly,” said one former worker, an American in his 40s who remains unemployed since his last day at Disney on Jan. 30. “It was so humiliating to train somebody else to take over your job. I still can’t grasp it.”
Disney executives said that the layoffs were part of a reorganization, and that the company opened more positions than it eliminated.
But the layoffs at Disney and at other companies, including the Southern California Edison power utility, are raising new questions about how businesses and outsourcing companies are using the temporary visas, known as H-1B, to place immigrants in technology jobs in the United States. These visas are at the center of a fierce debate in...
It’s not enough that American jobs are being taken by illegals. It’s
not enough that being bi-lingual has now become a job qualification that now exempts most Americans from many jobs in our society or, at a minimum, provides a preference to a non-American. Now we learn that foreigner federal employees are being paid better as well, much better.
A group called ProEnglish, an advocate for English as our “common, unifying language, and its adoption as “the official language at all levels of government,” filed multiple Freedom of Information requests for information relating to the pay scales for Obamacare clerks at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
They discovered that once again, Americans are treated as second class citizens in their own country, with English-speaking clerks making only about half of what their Spanish-speaking counterparts are paid. Native language speakers were found to earn $12 per hour, while those classified as translators, speaking only in Spanish, were paid over twice as much, an hourly rate of $22.75 plus an additional monthly stipend of $643.
In addition to the lower pay offered to English speakers, the documents revealed that almost 12 percent of the $90 million contract went specifically to the...
A poll by John McLaughlin confirms again we may have a significant problem with noncitizens participating illegally in our elections. Based on a sample survey of 800 Hispanics in 2013, McLaughlin found that of foreign-born respondents who were registered voters, 13 percent admitted they were not United States citizens.
In our 2012 book on voter fraud, John Fund and I noted numerous cases of noncitizen registration and voting all over the country. Only a month ago, the Board of Immigration Appeals of the Executive Office for Immigration Review at the Justice Department held that a Peruvian citizen who illegally registered and voted in the 2006 congressional election could be deported for violating federal law. The only reason she was caught is because she applied for naturalization in 2007 and admitted in the INS interview that she had voted in an American election.
In 2014, a study released by three professors at Old Dominion University and George Mason University, based on survey data from...
