Last spring, Leo Perrero, an American information technology worker at Walt Disney World, was given an ultimatum: either leave his job that day without pay, or train his foreign worker replacement for the next 90 days to get a severance package.
Perrero told the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest in Wednesday’s hearing on the impact of high-skilled immigration on U.S. workers that his story is not the exception. In late fall 2014, Disney executives told Perrero and hundreds of his fellow IT workers employed at the company’s Orlando park that they would be losing their jobs and training foreign workers who would replace them in three months.
“That day, 20 years of hard work, a bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, and an IT job for Disney were all over when my team, along with hundreds of others, were displaced by a less-skilled foreign work force imported into our country using the H-1B visa program,” said Perrero, a 10-year employee with Disney.
Perrero, a father, said he was forced to choose between providing for his family and stay on to train his replacement, or quitting instantaneously to symbolically stand up for Americans’ being displaced by cheaper labor.
In fear of living on unemployment and losing his healthcare benefits, he stuck around despite knowing the company was “going to simply cast us aside for their financial benefit.”
During the first month of training his replacement, all of his interactions were recorded and videotaped. The following day, the lessons were transcribed and read back to the employees.
“We noticed that the foreign workers requested that we kept going over the same basic concepts over and over. How would they take over our jobs when they were so inexperienced and slow to grasp the basics we wondered?” Perrero said.
The next month, both the guest worker and Perrero worked side by side. By the third month, the former IT workers watched the foreign workers completely take over, and on Jan. 31, 2015, they were terminated.
“How do I explain to my young children to follow their dreams and find a job that they love?” Perrero asked. “I followed my dream of having a career in technology to have my very same desk, chair, and computer all taken over by a foreign worker who was just flown in to America weeks before.”
“This situation at Disney is not an anomaly. This same abuse of the H-1B program is happening nationwide,” Perrero concluded. He urged the panel to pressure their colleagues not to continue passing bills that would increase guest worker numbers when there is an excess of U.S. STEM workers.
