Should US companies be able to fire/layoff US citizens to hire a cheaper employee through H-1B visa ?

[Bofferbrauer2]

MrWayne said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

At 4% unemployment, chances are that people with some specific educations are missing. Just look at Germany, where the unemployment rate dropped to about that, too, but where the industry is complaining for years now that there ain't enough people who learned manufacturing crafts like mechanics and electronics, which are thus in very high demand. Probably also one of the reasons why Merkel opened the flood-doors for the refugees in 2013.

However, they shouldn't be able to fire people first on a whim, but that's on US job security regulations.

I highly doubt that the lack of skilled worker in certain jobs played any role in the decisions she made back than, I also doubt that she wanted so many refugees to come.

"We don't have enough talent in the X-country" This sentence already tells you everything you have to know. Most of the time it is used when your own citizens don't wanna work in certain business because of bad working conditions and low wages.

Thing is, entrepreneurs and economists were already warning about that practically since the reunification, as more and more Germans decided that studying would get them a better job opportunity instead of manual jobs.

In this article from 3 years ago you can see where that is leading: even if all potential trainees wold find an employer, there would still be 15% open spots, and it's just getting worse every year. Or here, about 2013, where they describe how companies are trying to woo the trainees to their company with things like "business trips" to rock concerts around the world, company cars and good old hiring premiums - simply because there ain't enough for everybody. Several cities were especially short on trainable talents, especially in the eastern part of Germany, like Potsdam. permanently open spots that could not be covered with trainees reach at least as far back as 2008.

In other words, Merkel's open door immigration helped the country filling the holes in the manufacturing companies with fresh hirelings and trainees. Without them, I'm very sure the German economy wouldn't have been able to grow at it's current rate, as Germany would have been critically short on workers.