My Position On The Disney Layoffs

Better screengrab it before it disappears.

"I'm sharing news about it because this experience has taught me the H-1B Visa program needs to change to protect others in the future."

Anyone who still supports FWD.us and believes that the US doesn't produce enough professionals to satisfy the needs of our businesses is straight up, while they are reading this, actually holding a crack pipe to their mouth.

I usually don't comment on immigration policies because I'm a US citizen and have never been an immigrant worker, however I dont believe this affects the long term success or failure of the H1B visa program and nor should it. We do exist in a global economy and you must therefore compete globally. If a company feels that they can get equal talent to mine in another country for cheaper costs then so be it; I didn't do a good enough job selling my talent or showing why Im worth my rate. Its also the company's loss if they chose to lay me off; I know what Im worth and Ill go find what Im worth. Even without the H1B visa program, companies will still do this; whether or not the company can employ the employee on US soil or not. This is in no way threatening to my way of life or makes me fear for my future career prospects. It sucks that Disney did this to their employees, but companies are no longer loyal to their people and haven't been for a long time; you should act accordingly and not show any loyalty to a company that shows you none.

I'm not clear (or arguing the point) about how this is specific to H-1B. Companies routinely lay off older, more expensive workers to get cheaper, younger employees. It's not what companies should do, but they do it all of the time.

And then there's this, where apparently Disney cancelled the layoffs:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/in-turnabout-disney-...

Which I don't see how that's entirely possible given that the article posted by OP specifically states that many employees were already let go in January.

I can only speculate that the January layoffs were executed, and over the past week it was discovered that the 'replacement contractors' weren't the cheap magic rocket that Disney expected. That, too, happens in companies all of the time.

Protectionism doesn't work. There is wide consensus among economists on comparative advantage [1]. Healthy, non-protectionist immigration policies have been proposed to have similar effects as free trade [2,3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage [2] http://www.economics.uci.edu/files/docs/micro/s07/Peri.pdf [3] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100008723963904434771045775512...