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.
.. But for years, most top recipients of the visas have been outsourcing or consulting firms based in India, or their American subsidiaries, which import workers for large contracts to take over entire in-house technology units — and to cut costs. The immigrants are employees of the outsourcing companies.
Does Immigration Harm Working Americans?
CIS, a research organization that tends to favor tight immigration policies, found that even now, almost seven years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, 1.5 million fewer native-born Americans are working than in November 2007, the peak of the prior economic cycle. Balancing the 1.5 million fewer native-born Americans at work, there are 2 million more immigrants—legal and illegal—working in the United States today than in November 2007. All the net new jobs created since November 2007 have gone to immigrants.
.. Since the time of Adam Smith, economists have agreed that the secret of economic growth is specialization. Rather than everyone baking his or her own bread and sewing his or her own clothes, everyone chooses one occupation and then trades for the products others make. The more individuals specialize, the more productive everyone becomes. The more people trade, the more widely the benefits of productivity are shared.
.. Immigrant labor enables middle-class Americans to buy a roasted chicken and pre-washed salad at the supermarket or to check a box and have their holiday presents arrive at their door already gift-wrapped. Upper-income Americans live easier and more efficient lives thanks to millions of low-paid immigrant workers they never see and whose names they never know
.. Among high-school dropouts only, immigrants accounted for 23 percent of the increase in hours worked between 1990 and 2006. Among high school dropouts in their 30s and 40s, immigrants accounted for over one-third of the increase in hours worked.
.. they aren’t denying that immigration pushes wages down in the jobs that immigrants take. They concede that immigration does do that. They celebrate that immigration does that. Instead, they join their celebration of immigration’s wage-cutting effects with a prediction about the way that the natives will respond.
.. But that’s not how things are done. In the United States, the hypothesis of native-immigrant complementarity is deployed to justify policies that intensify competition for the lower and middle echelons of the society, rarely near the top.
GOP Will Lose in 2016 without Sensible Immigration Reform
However, economists also agree that the overall effect of increased immigration is positive. More immigrant workers create more demand for goods and services, which creates net new jobs over time.
Marco Rubio and the G.O.P. play a dangerous game on immigration.
Because Rubio comes from the small Cuban community, whose members have long been granted automatic citizenship—as political exiles, not as immigrants—he risks being perceived by Hispanics as an out-of-touch élitist.
.. Univision is the most respected institution among Hispanics in the country, ahead of the armed forces and the Catholic Church. “It is considered to be the institution that protects Latin-Americans in the U.S. and fights the institutions that abuse them,” he says.