by Mia Cathell at Washington Examiner
Microsoft is laying off about 9,000 employees after applying to fill thousands of foreign worker positions in the months leading up to the mass layoffs, according to a Washington Examiner analysis of U.S. Department of Labor data.
DOL quarterly statistics show that Microsoft submitted 4,776 labor condition applications, a prerequisite for filing H-1B visa petitions, between September and March, indicating to the U.S. government that it intends to fill 14,181 positions with foreign workers this fiscal year. The filings, however, include extensions to existing employment (3,680), petition amendments (285), and transfers (487), not just new H-1B hires, although the number of new foreign worker hires (9,738) was still high.
Moreover, this preliminary process typically involves companies like Microsoft overestimating the number of positions they want to fill by renewing existing visas or sponsoring new ones to provide a rough estimate to the DOL.
But the volume of applications for foreign worker positions, coming in the months before Microsoft laid off thousands of employees to cut costs, has drawn scrutiny to the Seattle-based tech giant amid a broader national debate over the effects of immigration policy on American workers and wages.
“It’s explicitly legal to replace Americans with H-1B workers,…