Re: Clear Violation
If you try to read the actual "H visa" laws the details are impenetrable because of too many references to "as defined in regulation <foo>". But at least one of the categories says you cannot fire Americans and then hire foreign replacements directly.
In this case Disney seems to have gotten around this because they switched to a contacting company so they were not directly hiring the replacements themselves and then acted totally shocked that the contractors were H1Bs. Presumably they will claim they had no idea this would happen ...
Obviously the cleanest solution would be to fix the law to prevent this "switch to H1 contractor" cheat. It's also not clear to me why the respectable tech companies hiring "normal" H1's don't lobby for this -- right now there's an H1 lottery every year and people sometimes can't get visas for college graduates because of other contract visas. You'd think people like Google would lobby to tighten up the rules so the contracting companies don't use up the whole quota.
The other issue is an H1B was historically for a specific job at a specific company and specific location. It's not clear how the visa should apply to a contractor position if it's not tied to the specific Disney job, or at least this seems to subvert the original intention if you had a contractor who could work for more than one end company.
In the meantime Disney seems to have acted outrageously here even if they found a legal loophole. We'll see what the court says..
Biting the hand that feeds IT
