Ten years after being laid off from Disney, Leo Perrero still views a visa program for skilled international workers as deeply flawed, blaming it for disrupting his information technology career and putting him in the unsettling position of having to train his foreign replacement.

“The whole thing is just a terrible scam on Americans,” said Perrero, who eventually was able to rebound and find another job in IT.

After his layoff in 2015, the Central Florida resident met with a then-sympathetic Donald Trump, spoke on the issue at Trump rallies, testified to Congress and shared his story on “60 Minutes.”

Despite that national attention, Perrero says politicians haven’t fixed critical loopholes in the H-1B visa program — which a decade later is the subject of fierce debate that has divided members of Trump’s MAGA movement as he prepares for his second term in the White House with vows to crack down swiftly on immigration abuses.

High-profile Trump supporters like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy say H-1B visas are vital for America’s economic success, helping attract the world’s top talent and putting the United States ahead globally. The program allows companies and institutions to bring in educated foreign professionals for “specialty” occupations that are hard to fill with U.S. workers.

But critics, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, MAGA guiding light Steve Bannon and some other GOP leaders, say it wrongly allows companies to outsource jobs to lower-paid foreigners. The debate played out in December on the X social media platform with Musk and Ramaswamy defending the program against criticism that it was taking U.S. jobs, and Trump himself surprisingly taking their side.

Florida has a big stake in the outcome of this debate. Companies and institutions based here, from the University of Florida to AdventHealth to iconic brands like Publix and the cruise line operator Carnival Corp., have relied on the program to fill jobs, according to federal immigration data reviewed by the Orlando Sentinel.

In total, Florida-based companies and institutions list about 9,500 H-1B visa holders as employees, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data. Nationwide, there were more than 386,000 approved H-1B visa holders in the 2023 budget year, including 119,000 initial approvals and about 267,000 extensions to existing visas. Those are the most recent numbers available from the federal government.

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GOP megadonor Kenneth Griffin — a top DeSantis contributor — runs the Citadel hedge fund, which has H-1B visa employees in Florida. Griffin said immigrants are an important part of Miami-based Citadel’s leadership team.

“These are people that have come to this country, they have left everything behind because they believe in the American dream and the opportunity that our country represents,” Griffin said at a November event, explaining his view that lawful immigration should be supported while also addressing what he called “chaos on the Southern border.”

The American Immigration Council argues that H-1B visa holders fill critical needs in science, engineering and technology, and these foreign workers often go on to start their own businesses in America.

But Perrero and other critics say the H-1B program has strayed from its objective of addressing shortages of skilled workers and now supports an offshoring business model that puts profits ahead of American workers.

Compared with the broader job market, H-1B visa workers do well, earning a median salary of $118,000, federal data shows. Employers must offer a “prevailing wage” in line with what U.S. workers earn in comparable jobs. But some researchers have questioned whether that happens.

A 2020 report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found employers have wide latitude in classifying jobs and setting salaries, allowing them to pay H-1B workers less. For instance, salaries in computer occupations were 17% to 34% lower on average for visa holders, according to the report.

Criticism of the program has come from the political right and left. DeSantis wants reforms but so does left-wing U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. In his endorsement of Musk’s viewpoint, Trump called it a “great program”  that he has used in his own businesses, although multiple media reports have suggested that is not true.

Loopholes are ‘destroying careers,’ critic says

Perrero said he was among roughly 250 Disney employees who were told in October 2014 that their IT jobs would be eliminated and replaced by H-1B visa workers employed by the global consulting companies HCL and Cognizant. The laid-off employees spent their final three months at Disney training their foreign replacements, enticed by “stay bonuses” and the prospect that they could apply for new positions with the company.

But Perrero said those new opportunities never materialized for him and many of his colleagues, leaving him feeling betrayed by a company that had given him good performance reviews.

“That is the business model that is really destroying careers and families and marriages,” Perrero said, though it is “very profitable” for companies.

U.S. workers in situations similar to Perrero’s have little legal recourse, said Sara Blackwell, a Sarasota employment lawyer who represented Perrero and other ex-Disney workers in lawsuits over the layoffs.

A federal judge dismissed their legal challenge in 2016, ruling that Disney and its contractors did not run afoul of the visa requirements.

Blackwell said companies’ use of such outsourcing firms is one way they can dodge the protections for U.S. workers in visa law and end up with lower-paid foreign labor. 

Disney did not respond to questions about its use of H-1B visas now. At the time, company officials defended the IT reorganization, saying it spurred innovation and produced a net gain of 70 jobs, with some of the affected employees being rehired.

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President Joe Biden’s administration rolled out changes Friday that aim to streamline the H-1B visa approval process, but critics say a more extensive overhaul is needed.

“It needs to be fixed and done in a way that helps America and the workers, both American and foreign, and not a way to make CEOs richer,” Blackwell said.

H-1B visas in Florida

In Florida, people on H-1B visas fill positions as software developers, financial analysts, professors and physicians, among others.

Top state users of the program include the Tampa-based staffing company Kforce, UF, the Sunrise-based medical staffing firm Management Health Systems, Plantation-based online pet supply retailer Chewy, the hospital system AdventHealth, the University of Miami, and the Citadel hedge fund, which recently moved its headquarters from Chicago to Miami.

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The global consulting and accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers is listed as the top user of H-1B visas in Florida, according to federal immigration data.

Foreign scholars rely on the program to teach and research in the United States, particularly in computer science, engineering, physics and chemistry departments, said Talat Rahman, a University of Central Florida physics professor who used the H-1B program as part of a move from Pakistan to the United States.

UCF uses 40 workers on an H-1B visa, according to federal data. The University of Florida employs almost 250 workers on H-1B visas.

American applicants likely aren’t being overlooked for these academic positions because there are a limited number of U.S. graduates in many science and technology fields, Rahman said.

In 2023, for example, about 60% of those who earned Ph.Ds in computer science from U.S. universities were temporary visa holders, not citizens or permanent residents, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.

“This is the land of immigrants, right?” Rahman said. “These are very skilled people who are coming in.”

The medical field uses the H-1B visa program to help address physician and nursing shortages. AdventHealth is working with local colleges and universities to grow its pipeline of health care workers — but also hiring international applicants for positions that can’t be filled with domestic hires, said David Breen, a hospital spokesman.

Nationwide, tech giants like Amazon, Google and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, are among the biggest recipients of H-1B visas. The list is also dominated by lesser-known consulting firms, such as Infosys, Cognizant and Tata, supplying companies with tech workers on contract.

The H-1B program is capped at 85,000 new visas a year. That cap, though, doesn’t apply to some institutions, such as universities and nonprofit research organizations, so the actual number of visas issued is higher. Still, demand for the program typically far exceeds available visas, which are awarded via a lottery rather than a merit-based system.

The H-1B visa is valid for up to six years. Workers are eligible to apply for a green card, which allows permanent residency in the United States, but such a path can be elusive given the backlog to process those applications.

As a result, H-1B visa workers are beholden to their employer to stay in the United States, said Ron Hira, a Howard University professor who has written extensively on outsourcing and the H-1B visa program.

If their employment ends, they must find another job within 60 days to remain in the U.S. Sanders, the firebrand senator from Vermont, has likened these workers to “indentured servants.”

Hira said it’ll be difficult to disrupt the status quo, even with an incoming president who rode into the White House on an “America First” campaign. The Disney layoffs got widespread attention 10 years ago, but they didn’t substantially move the needle in Washington, he said.

“It is really hard to get change,” Hira said. “There is no organized interest in Washington or Tallahassee that represents the interest of those workers. This is all about power and politics.”