December 9, 2024 – Insiders tell how IT giant favors Indian H-1B workers over US employees

In Email/Dossier/Govt Corruption Investigations, Featured Timeline Entries by Katie Weddington

Former American employees of Cognizant from left to right: Latreecia Folkes, Jean-Claude Franchitti, Christy Palmer, Abby Israel and Jack Benedict

Six months into her job, Latreecia Folkes had launched a new project and received a letter of praise from her supervisor. And then, she says, she was told to train her replacement on the project, a worker from India. She balked at that but was replaced anyway.

Over the next two years, Folkes said, she was repeatedly denied opportunities for advancement as a project manager at Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., one of the world’s largest information-technology outsourcing firms. She was offered chances to apply for roles that required her to relocate, but she couldn’t because her mother was ill. Over time, her relationship with the company grew strained, and Folkes said she knows why.

“I definitely knew it was because of me being an American, not being Indian, and also because I was Black,” she said in an interview. Folkes filed an internal discrimination complaint in 2017, three days before she was fired.

In October, a jury in a federal class-action lawsuit returned a verdict that found Cognizant intentionally discriminated against more than 2,000 non-Indian employees between 2013 and 2022. The verdict, which echoed a previously undisclosed finding from a 2020 US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation, centered on discrimination claims based on race and national origin. Cognizant, based in Teaneck, New Jersey, was found to have preferred workers from India, most of whom joined the firm’s US workforce of about 32,000 using skilled-worker visas called H-1Bs.

The case is part of a wave of recent discrimination claims against IT outsourcing companies that underscore growing concerns that these firms have exploited a broken employment-visa system to secure a cheaper, more malleable workforce. In the process, US workers say they’ve been disadvantaged. The industry, which provides computer services to other companies, makes extensive use of H-1Bs; over the past decade and a half, no employer has obtained more of them than Cognizant, federal records show.

Cognizant spokesman Jeff DeMarrais said the company plans to appeal the verdict and disagrees with the EEOC finding. “Cognizant provides equal employment opportunities for all employees and does not tolerate discrimination in any form,” he said. He also said the company has sought fewer new visas over the past several years and said any apparent disparities in its hiring stem from a shortage of US tech workers. “Like many consulting firms and other technology companies in the US, Cognizant utilizes the H-1B visa program to fill positions it cannot fill with available US workers,” DeMarrais wrote in one of several emailed responses to questions from Bloomberg News.

Indeed, the H-1B program was designed to help US employers find specialized talent. But a decade’s worth of records from the US Department of Labor shows that outsourcing companies, including Cognizant, have used the visas mostly to fill lower-level positions, such as IT system analysts and administrators. Fewer than 20% of the 6,400 visa holders Cognizant has sponsored since 2020 had a master’s degree or higher, according to data from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. At companies such as Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc., that figure is about 60%. (Read more: Bloomberg News, 12/09/2024)  (Arvhive)

In Trump ‘45, the President had a showdown with the Tennessee Valley Authority over 200 American jobs that TVA had switched to H1Bs.

In the run-up to Christmas, TVA fired these 200 Americans – and had them train their foreign replacements on the way out.

They did this despite the fact that TVA is (1) a government agency; (2) founded to improve the material station of poor Americans, and (3) manages critical energy infrastructure for a large swath of the country.

My team and I proposed a plan to President Trump to reinstate the terminated American workers. Because the President of TVA cannot be fired by the President of the United States we thought President Trump should hold the TVA board members responsible – the highly-compensated decision-makers who had orchestrated the H1B worker swap.

The President agreed. He started firing TVA board members one at a time, with a demand to reinstate the Americans to their jobs. It didn’t take long before the TVA president and the remaining Board members agreed to reinstate the American workers.

At the time, some skeptical commentators said it was meaningless because it was “only” 200 jobs. But it was an important moment for two reasons.

First, these 200 jobs mattered to 200 American families, especially with Christmas approaching.

Second, it set an outer boundary for what short-term labor visas (which is ultimately what the H1B visa is) should NOT be used for: to replace competent American workers in a critical industry with temporary foreign visa workers just to save a buck.

There is broad agreement on the right about what H1B visas – or any other visa – should NOT be used for. The TVA showdown is an example of that.

Agreeing on this common understanding is the right starting place for this incoming administration.

1. I led the drafting of legislation in the Trump ‘45 White House to create a new legal immigration framework. I saw firsthand what happens when ANY visa reform is proposed: executives from the biggest multinationals and lobbyists from all kinds of industries are banging on the door, demanding to keep what they have.

2. What they have is a tangled morass of visa classes that are carve-outs, handouts, and special favors to particular industries, bought and paid for through decades of lobbying feckless members of Congress and presidential administrations. Industries lobby for the foreign workers they claim to “need,” and then they get a visa class carve-out, which they protect (and seek to expand) at all costs.

3. And there are enormous costs for our nation – costs that fall on the American worker with devastating consequences. The statistics bear that out: job gains go to foreign-born workers while American workers post net job losses.

I also know this firsthand because I grew up a working class kid, watching my father (and by extension, our family) suffer from unfair foreign labor competition.

4. For too long, Americans have been largely unaware of the source of these problems because the policies are designed to be too complicated and are made largely invisible to public scrutiny. I’m glad the right is having an open debate about legal immigration. It is past time.

5. To be clear, the difference between O1Bs and H1Bs matters in this debate, for example, because these visas are intended to accomplish very different goals and are entirely different in scale, BUT both visa classes are rife with abuse. (Plenty of Reggaeton stars and anti-American athletes enter the U.S. on O-1 visas.) Essentially ALL visa classes are abused. Again, that’s because these things exist to serve special interests on one side of the labor market (and it’s not the side of the American worker).

6. The debate can’t be confined to a single industry – it’s about Big Tech, Big Ag, tourism and hospitality, transportation (airlines, trucking), the media & sports entertainment complex (yes, the NFL and MLB have their own special visa classes and their own special treatment by DHS and State) and many many others. They all want special visas to import cheap and convenient foreign labor. Even the roofing industry is now seeking its own special visa class. And all of these special classes get expanded over time, allowing the American worker to be flooded with foreign competitors for no reason other than labor savings for employers.

7. I, like many Americans, voted for a sealed border and an immigration moratorium. Americans need to retake control of our immigration system — how many are coming in, for what reasons, and for how long. One question absent from our current system: how does this individual immigrant benefit the American nation and her people? No more blanket exemptions or economic rationales. Immigration is a regime-based question, as both Hamilton and Jefferson wrote on extensively, and our system should reflect that Americans must also demand meaningful investment in assimilation and integration requirements for legal immigrants here already.