Free Republic

The Obama administration this week rejected a request from Congress to investigate potential abuses in the country’s key guest-worker program for tech workers, insisting it would “be premature” to look into Southern California Edison’s use of the controversial H-1B visa to outsource jobs. A bipartisan group of senators, led by Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions and Democratic Sen. Richard J. Durbin, had asked for a probe after SCE employees testified they were booted from jobs and replaced with guest-workers. Leon Rodriguez, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said his agency takes such allegations seriously — but said there isn’t enough...

- A Restructuring and H-1B Visas Affect the Magic Kingdom's IT Operations At the end of October, IT employees at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts were called, one-byone, into conference rooms to receive notice of their layoffs. Multiple conference rooms had been set aside for this purpose, and in each room an executive read from a script informing the worker that their last day would be Jan. 30, 2015. Some workers left the rooms crying; others appeared shocked. This went on all day. As each employee received a call to go to a conference room, others in the office looked...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - T.J. Rodgers, chief executive of Cypress Semiconductor Corp., had a simple solution to the hassles of getting visas for foreign engineers he needed to run his $1 billion business. "When I hire an Indian PhD today, I hire him in Bangalore, not San Jose. Now I can hire all I want and not have to worry about the vagaries of government decrees," Rodgers said. "They've made it less tenable to do business here, so we do business elsewhere," Rodgers told Reuters in an interview. News this week that the U.S. immigration service hit its annual quota...