Former Disney Workers Abandon Legal Fight on H-1Bs

By John Miano on May 10, 2018

The former Disney workers have thrown in the towel in their legal fight. As you may remember, the management at Disney replaced 250 American computer programmers and used the H-1B visa program to replace them with cheap, foreign workers.

The history of the Disney displacements shows that the media needs to drop the false narrative about the H-1B program that industry lobbyists have fed it:

[H-1B] was designed to help American companies fill jobs with high-skilled workers from other countries, when there aren't enough Americans available to do the work.

There is no requirement that H-1B workers fill only high-skilled jobs. There is no requirement that Americans are not available before getting H-1B workers. However, in 1998, Congress explicitly made it legal to replace Americans with H-1B workers. In 2004, Congress changed the H-1B "prevailing wage" rules to allow employers to pay H-1B worker at the 17th percentile of U.S. wages.

For an honest debate on H-1B, we need to argue over the true intent of H-1B as enacted by Congress:

The purpose of the H-1B program is to provide employers cheap foreign labor to replace American workers.

No other statement of purpose is consistent with what Congress has put into law.

The sleazy behavior of the Disney management and the unsuccessful legal challenges to it demonstrate that the H-1B program is not fixable because it is not broken.

The H-1B program is not being abused; the H-1B program itself is abusive and needs to be completely discarded.