Dive Brief:

• In a recent twist of work visa usage, The New York Times reports that some employers may be abusing the oft-criticized H-1B visa program to use foreign workers to learn how to do a U.S. worker's job, then those same employers are hiring the foreign worker to do the same job after they return fully trained to their home country.
• The same companies are laying off the workers whose jobs were sent overseas.
• Workers who lost jobs were offered a severance package, and career transition services.

Dive Insight:

For their part, companies in the Times article — Toys 'R' Us and New York Life — say not only have they not broken any immigration laws, but they all have strategic and financial reasons for using the H-1B workers to supplant domestic workers.

Toys 'R' Us told the Times that the staff reduction was part of "designing a streamlined, more efficient global organization to make it fit for growth." And New York Life told the Times that the outsourcing was part of a "transformation of its technology systems that would soon result in more jobs in the United States."

At the same time, the the U.S. Labor Department has had an ongoing investigation of the practice, focusing on several large outsourcers whose workers are in the U.S. using temporary work visas.