The news that Microsoft will fire thousands of workers in both the immediate and long term, related mostly to its once-industry leading XBox gaming system, has raised scrutiny over an old immigration loophole, largely, that allows workers dubbed as highly skilled from other countries, who would otherwise not be let in, to be brought here to solve the labor needs including shortages of mostly large employers.
That’s this business news breakdown, in a nutshell, fighting through the gobbledygook. Or so it goes.
This company that in a recent year just got done firing many thousands, has now announced it is letting go another 4,800, 2.1 percent of its global workforce, in the latest news of a high-profile U.S. layoff, but this recent action also involving its employees almost everywhere. All in the name of worker wages, among other things, and there also is a move to divest four studios, some smaller ones that could be called art houses as creativity goes by the wayside, and a couple who are being sold back to those owners who the corporate giant bought them from.
All this to me brings about meanings of songs from Industrial Disease by Dire Straits to Breaking The Law by Judas Priest.
President Trump, who is all about big business, is now broadcasting far and wide an interesting cry for reform, of the program for H-1B visas, which has itself been “reformed” many times over decades. But hey, the latest layoff move got the wrath of Bernie Sanders, too.
This in an employment time when, such as it is, immigration is being frowned upon and workers from foreign countries are being kicked out and killed by ICE, and the majority of detainees held in deportation camps are being ruled by judges as unlawful.
But what business needs …
Microsoft, which to be fair has a total work force of well over 200,000, has said it needs these employees, even in the wake in firing a greater number of others, to keep pace in a business world now evolving and needing its company to reshape its divisions, and being dominated by AI, and adds that many of those who were let go have been, in a bit of big business jargon that I think I am getting right, redemployed. Many jobs ended were in corporate sales and creative performance sectors. But hey, some, whoa, were even in or near management levels, to free up money for AI infrastructure. That includes the controversial data centers, such as the one as proposed drawing the wrath of residents right here in mid-St. Croix County.
This law has quietly over many decades become one of the most highly politicized legislative immigration actions ever undertaken, given the breadth of the will to reshape it, and the ongoing motivations for the reforms are to say the least, interesting.
The following is a sorta brief history:
The whole lawmaking shebang started as a large-scale effort to give the essentially banned Asians the right to immigration and then citizenship, back in 1952 over President Harry Truman’s veto, just after the end of World War II, and to achieve such family unification and give preferred status to most Europeans. It was then every six to 15 years afterward, largely, refashioned under the administration of presidents, taken in total to encompass various persuasions, in 1965, 1980, 1986, notably 1996, and 2002, before today’s events.
The laws came under the headings of the Immigration and Nationality Act, (named for a second time in ’65), The Refugee Act, The Immigration Reform and Control Act, The Immigration Act, The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and then The Homeland Security Act.
Over the course of it, the regulation came under the auspices of the Department of (originally State and) Homeland Security, long before its oftentimes seen as politically motivated actions of today’s U.S. landscape. Of course, even though a part of the initial framework was to appease fears of the Cold War, as times moved on the laws were used to deport those seen as a security risk.
Originally, people could be withheld or even deported, even for health reasons, as maybe seen unfit to work. For a length of time the broad legal framework to formally codify an old structure of laws and traditions, was largely based along lines of quotas of origin that gave favor to certain nations, raising controversy. It also, interestingly enough, gave preference to those in our hemisphere, to allow an influx of agricultural workers.
Even in early times, the motivation was listed as bringing workers with very specialized skills into the United States. Interestingly, the professions sought even included modeling. (Does this graduating class include current First Lady Melania Trump?) All participants need to have a bachelor’s degree or equivalent by three times over work experience, presumably in their field of expertise. They are required to be paid dutifully a salary of at least $60,000, a rate which seems bargain basement by the standards of today’s professionals.
On the face of it all, this taken today seems to be a method to bring certain individuals, maybe with a degree of privilege or good fortune — but said to have a high degree of needed talent, which arguably also would amount to a cheap labor force — into the country. Some would say it also increases our competitiveness in the global market amidst the increasingly competitive world of AI. Others might argue that it’s simply a symptom of the reality of living in a country long dominated by the will of Donald Trump.