CT Techworkers submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, asking for all paperwork and e-mails relating to the state’s $18M deal with Infosys.
The request was just recently complied with and we just started sifting through the mountain of paperwork – but one of our long-standing questions was finally answered.
All along, we’ve been asking the Lamont Administration and Infosys to answer a simple question: Will the state require that American citizens be hired at the Infosys Hartford office, as part of this taxpayer-funded deal? The answer is NO!
Look at this email exchange between an Infosys rep and a state-hired attorney on this case:
Finally, we get the truth. Under the deal, workers at Infosys in Hartford can be permanent residents (i.e., have a green card [a citizenship status that bestows all the rights of a US citizen except the right to vote]).
Foreign workers can be granted a green card in one of two ways:
- The EB-5 program enables wealthy foreigners to “purchase” a green card after investing at least $500,000 in an American business that creates 10 jobs or more.
- Most foreign workers acquire a green card via a sponsorship from their employer. In the IT industry, this happens after years of working long hours as an L-1 or H-1B Visa holder. Acquiring a green card is the gold standard among foreign workers – but so few are ever awarded it.
Their answer doesn’t surprise us. We actually kind of expected it. When we posed this question at our rally in Hartford in January of 2019, they danced around the issue.
In response to our rally, Governor Lamont issued this statement:
“Governor Lamont looks forward to Infosys becoming a key economic player in our state. These will be full-time jobs for individuals, many of whom live, work and play in our communities across the state.”
Also responding to our rally, Jeff Auker, an Infosys exec, first appeared to refute our claims – and promised that ALL workers at Infosys in Hartford would be American (see the first 25 seconds of this video). But later, in that same interview, he seemed to backpedal on that by saying workers there will be “Visa-independent.”
We understand that politicians and business leaders have to “fudge” their words – especially if they might make them look bad to some portion of the public. But, in this case, they seem to be following a disturbing new trend of trivializing American citizenship, a legal status many of our ancestors sacrificed their lives for. The words they use attempt to bend the definition of what an American is and are the same words used by globalists, who have shipped so many of our jobs overseas and have encouraged limitless immigration (which has displaced so many minority American workers).
It’s been a while since I looked at the interview with Mr. Auker. He comes off as such a sad and tired shell of a human being and I can’t help but feel sorry for him. It must be hell working for a company that abuses their workers and has been fined millions by the federal government for skirting US Visa laws. When he was a little boy, did he want to grow up and help an organization facilitate an international labor racket that has been compared to slavery? I wonder if his Mom is proud of him?
We’ve reached out to the Lamont administration to get a breakdown of how many of the Infosys hires are green card holders – but our calls were not returned.
The fact that Infosys hires mostly foreign-born workers in the US is certainly not shocking. But the fact that politicians continue to return to this tried-and-failed approach to economic development is truly astounding. It simply benefits no one – except the people who traffic in supply the foreign workers and the lawyers that facilitate their Visas. Plus, it has added drawbacks of either displacing American workers – or letting them languish as part of some head fake on a workforce development scam.