Bloomberg News: Staffing Firm Discriminated Against U.S. Graduates

A major U.S.-based company discriminated against U.S. graduates while it used the H-1B visa program to place low-salary Indian graduates into U.S. white-collar jobs, according to a report in Bloomberg News.

The company, Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation, has repeatedly promised to hire more American graduates, but the pledges were “all smoke and mirrors,” said employee Sonya McLaughlin, a U.S. hiring manager.

“The entire business model is built on the back of cheap Indian labor,” she told Bloomberg. “The [Indian] people who are on visas are the people Cognizant wants.”

The article is titled “Insiders Tell How IT Giant Favored Indian H-1B Workers Over US Employees.”

Bloomberg noted:

In October, a jury in a federal class-action lawsuit returned a verdict that found Cognizant intentionally discriminated against more than 2,000 non-Indian employees between 2013 and 2022. The verdict, which echoed a previously undisclosed finding from a 2020 US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation, centered on discrimination claims based on race and national origin. Cognizant, based in Teaneck, New Jersey, was found to have preferred workers from India, most of whom joined the firm’s US workforce of about 32,000 using … visas called H-1Bs.

The article sheds some light on an emerging migration problem facing President Donald Trump. He has just been elected on a promise to shut down illegal migration and labor smuggling — but many of his business allies want to protect the inflow of Indian and Chinese college graduates into a huge variety of career-starting jobs needed by young American graduates.

The Bloomberg article noted that Cognizant is expected to appeal the jury decision. “Cognizant provides equal employment opportunities for all employees and does not tolerate discrimination in any form,” said a company spokesman.

“Cognizant complies with federal laws regarding pay for visa workers …. [and] disagrees that any financial incentive exists to hire visa workers,” the spokesman said.

White-Collar Staffing Companies

Companies are “offshoring nearly every [white collar] job in America because there is no labor market test” to determine if American graduates are available, said John Miano, a lawyer with the Center for Immigration Studies.

President Joe Biden’s pro-migration deputies have accelerated white-collar outsourcing. For example, a major migration law firm reported on December 9:

The Department of State (DOS) has released an update of the J-1 Exchange Visitor Skills List (“Skills List”) effective December 9, 2024. The revised list removes a large number of countries and broadens opportunities for current or former J-1 nonimmigrants to remain in or return to the United States.

The Cognizant verdict and the Bloomberg article are “validation for what we’ve been doing for the past several years,” Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, told Breitbart News. He added:

These employment visa programs were designed to displace American graduates, not bring in the best and brightest. There are plenty of [other visa] programs out there that do allow us to bring in the best and brightest, and what we will have to do is have that discussion with [business] groups that are saying they need more skilled immigrants.

‘What we’ll have to do is teach them how to invest in their American workforce and no longer discriminate against their American workforce,” he said, adding:

They will be just fine. Innovation and productivity have been the big casualties of this “Indian Era of Displacement” because we have not brought in the best and the brightest. We brought in very ordinary workers, and so innovation and productivity have taken hits, and so has American competitiveness … We have large numbers of Indians who are now in management positions, hiring and promoting their own. That’s a huge hit to professionalism because it’s not a meritocracy.

After-inflation salaries for U.S. graduates have stalled since 2000, even as housing prices have exploded, according to Stastista.com. Since 2008, “compensation grew at a rate of just 0.15 percent per year” for technology graduates, the Center for Immigration Studies reported on August 30. Meanwhile, business groups are demanding more white-collar migration.

Many of the American graduates who are pushed off the career ladder by visa workers never regain their income or career prospects.

The underlying problem, Lynn said, is that Wall Street and corporate managers want cheap labor for immediate profits. That policy destroys innovation, professionalism, and productivity at companies such as Boeing and Intel Corp. he said. “This efficiency model is what white-collar Americans have been suffering under for the last three decades,” Lynn said.

In contrast, Elon Musk’s rocket business cannot use visa workers because of Cold War restrictions on the export of technology.

The Bloomberg report includes comments and legal testimony from U.S. graduates who worked at Cognizant,

For example, Abby Israel was hired to oversee the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, Bloomberg wrote:

In 2018, Israel’s team produced an internal report that found large racial disparities in rates of “involuntary terminations” at Cognizant over the first eight months of the year. Black employees were let go at a rate 23 times that of Asian [mostly Indian] workers, the data showed. For Hispanic or Latino employees, the rate was 16 times the rate of their Asian counterparts. For White workers, it was eight times as high. (The Asian workers were overwhelmingly from India and were working on [H-1B and other] visas, according to the report.) Israel told the jury that those were some of the most extreme racial disparities she’d ever seen. She also said that when she reached out to Cognizant’s hiring managers with those findings, her supervisor told her to stop sharing the data beyond HR leaders.

The huge supply of compliant visa workers also allows C-Suite managers to ignore the advice of U.S. professionals. Bloomberg reported one example:

When Christy Palmer joined Cognizant in 2013, she relished the opportunity to work at a multinational corporation that served some of the most iconic US companies. It wasn’t long before she began to feel out of place, uncomfortable and, at times, intimidated, she said during court proceedings and interviews with Bloomberg. At a client meeting in 2015, a Cognizant director was struggling to respond to questions about a report Palmer had written, so she tried to step in with an answer. According to Palmer and another person present, the director cut her off, swearing loudly at her to shut up.

Numbers

At least 250,000 new mid-skilled workers annually arrive seeking U.S. starter white-collar jobs. They come with H-1B, L-1, H4EAD, or L-1 work visas, with Optional Practical Training (OPT) work permits granted after college enrollment, or by using tourist visas to sneak past airport customs officers.

Once in the United States, most of the migrants are absorbed by the many corrupt ethnic-hiring and job-selling networks that exclude millions of ordinary American graduates. Most of the visa workers are rented out to brand-name U.S. firms by many staffing agencies run by Indian managers.

Both Facebook and Apple have been fined token sums after the federal government found evidence of discrimination against Americans.

Foreign white-collar visa workers hold at least 2 million jobs that would otherwise go to young American graduates. The replacement workers are very profitable to tech investors who gain roughly $20 in stock value for every dollar saved in salaries.

Cognizant is a staffing firm launched in India in 1994 by India-0rigin immigrants working for Wall Street’s Dun & Bradstreet.  The company is now based in Teaneck, N.J., and the board reports mostly to the large-scale investors — including Vanguard and BlackRock — who own at least 50 percent of the company’s stock.

Many lower-cost, mid-skilled Indian graduates who work for U.S. staffing firms expect to get U.S. residency and citizenship in exchange for years of hard work and low pay in the United States.

In turn, India’s government uses diplomacy and trade deals to help export its graduates to U.S. jobs. It also works with allies — such as the India Caucus in Congress — to protect the white-collar staffing companies that are hired by Fortune 500 executives and investors.

The lawsuit is Palmer v. Cognizant Tech. Solutions Corp., 17-cv-06848, US District Court, Central District of California in Los Angeles.