Consider This from NPR - Tech Layoffs Throw Immigrants' Lives Into Limbo

Episode Date: December 12, 2022

In November, Huy Tu found out they were one of 11,000 Meta employees being laid off. Tu is allowed to stay in the U.S. through the OPT program, which requires that they be employed. Since there is only a 90-day grace period for employees who are laid off, Tu is now racing to find a new job. That will be especially difficult because nearly 150,000 tech workers have lost their jobs this year, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks the number.NPR's Stacey Vanek Smith reports on the struggle many immigrants are now facing.Betsey Stevenson, a labor economist at the University of Michigan who also served in the Obama administration, explains what the tech layoffs might mean for the broader economy.You can hear more about the tech layoffs on 1A.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University is committed to moving the world forward, working to tackle some of society's biggest challenges. Nine campuses, one purpose. Creating tomorrow, today. More at iu.edu. Huita remembers the first time they walked through the doors of the Meta offices in New York City earlier this year. They had just landed a job as a research scientist working on Instagram. I was very excited for it because I feel like everything finally clicked. It's like what I wanted, the location, the job package. Thu is from Vietnam.

They came to the U.S. eight years ago to study, and this was their first real tech industry job. Thu says it just felt like they were finally adulting, living the kind of life that their parents wanted for them. It's like I finally like make it, you know, like the American dream, as cliche as it sounds. But that dream did not last long. Early last month, Teh got an email. Meta was eliminating 13 percent of its workforce, 11,000 positions, and Teh's was one of them. I didn't have time to like really process. To be honest, I just kind of like on spiral. Losing a job is always hard, but for Teh, it's worse. They're allowed to work in the U.S. through

a program called OPT. It allows them to stay in the country only as long as they are employed. There's only a 90-day grace period for employees who are laid off. So if Tu hasn't locked down a job by February 7th, they may be forced to leave the country. For the first two weeks, I wake up every day and I just feel like, it feels surreal. Is this reality or is it a nightmare?

And finding a new job is especially challenging because of what is going on in the tech industry right now. Nearly 150,000 tech workers have been laid off this year, according to the tracking site layoffs.fyi. More than a third of those cuts happened between November and now. That means there is a lot of competition now for any job that Tho might apply for. Competing with that market is crazy because right now it's like flip right like usually it's like usually more opportunity than the talent pool but not a talent pool is more than the job market. Tho says they have already applied for 80 jobs. And they know they can't be picky. I definitely have to settle a lot.

I'm not even thinking about the salary. Tuh hasn't even told their parents about the layoff. They're older and Tuh doesn't want to stress them out. In fact, this all unfolded so quickly that Tuh never told their parents about their job at Meta at all. Actually, they don't even know that I work for Meta. I was going to surprise them. I just say that to them that I work for a startup. T' was planning on telling them during a long-planned trip to Vietnam for the Lunar New Year next month. But that trip won't be happening now because T' can't afford to pause the job hunt.

Consider this. After a deluge of tech layoffs, many immigrants are in the same position as Tull. We'll hear about what's next for them and what the tech downturn means for the broader U.S. economy. From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. It's Monday, December 12th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. For years, the tech industry has been in one long, virtually uninterrupted boom. But that's changed now.

Here's Richard Lawler, a senior news editor at The Verge. Where in years before, in tech, it was very popular to be the company that was talking about, OK, we're spending and we're investing and we're growing and we're talking about how much our customer base is growing. Now they want to talk about how profitable they are. And cutting costs is a part of that. And a big part of cutting costs has been cutting jobs. Tech workers used to be so sought after that they could command incredible benefits packages, high salaries, crazy perks. But now those things have dried up. It has changed. And they are employees and are being

treated similar to what we've seen in other industries where they're being treated as disposable, whereas before they were treated as stars. And there are signs that this could be the new norm. Nick Bunker is the head of economic research at the recruiting website Indeed. One thing that has stood out to me is that in addition to, say, marketing roles in some engineering positions, lots of recruiters have been let go as well, which suggests that the demand to hire more in the future is really going down because you let go of the people who do the hiring when you have no plans to wrap up hiring anytime soon. Bunker and Lawler were speaking on the public radio show 1A. You can find a link to that full

segment in our episode notes. According to the American Immigration Council, foreign-born employees represent nearly a quarter of the STEM workforce in the U.S. Not all of them depend on work visas, but for those who do, a slow job market can be especially excruciating. NPR's Stacey Vanek-Smith has been looking into what this round of layoffs means for these workers. She brought us Huita's story, which we heard at the top. And as Stacey reports, there are a lot of tech workers in a similar situation. Back in March of 2020, Aditya Taude was working at a tech company near Boston. Things were going well. He'd just gotten a promotion. But COVID and lockdown hit his employer hard. The office was closed down. The company

called a virtual all-staff meeting, and Taude had a bad feeling. Almost immediately, the CEO confirmed his worst fears. Saying that they are taking a decision to let people go, and the people who are being let go will get an email within the next hour. Taude was in his living room, glued to his computer, refreshing his email again and again. And then, all of a sudden, there it was. The email. I don't know the subject line, but it just started, there it was, the email. I don't remember the subject line, but it just started that if you're getting this email, that means you're one of the thousand employees who are being let go,

and these are the next steps you need to take. What did you do when you read that? I had a very shaky voice when I told this to my wife. I then went to the bathroom and I cried. Taude and his wife are from India. They had been in the U.S. for five years. Their life was here. But Taude was in the U.S. on an H-1B or skilled worker visa. Tech companies use these visas a lot to find workers they say they cannot find in the U.S.

The H-1B visa ties a worker to a particular job, and if they lose that job, a countdown clock starts. Taude got his emotions together and immediately started making a plan. Let me take out this emotion and then think of it strategically, like this is happening. So I have two months. Two months. People who lose their job on an H-1B visa have 60 days to lock down a new job before they have to leave the country. Right now, thousands of H-1B visa holders are facing this same ticking clock. Joshua Browder is the CEO of Do Not Pay, an AI-based legal services startup. He says it's always been such a struggle to find talent. He said to pay recruiters, to find people.

So after he heard the news about Meta's thousands of layoffs, he sent out a quick note on Twitter. If you have recently been laid off and hold an H-1B visa, we would love to chat with you at Do Not Pay. 25% of our team are not U.S. citizens, and we can move quickly. Browder thought, maybe I'll get a few really top people who've been laid off, kind of a win-win. We've had hundreds of people reach out. Some of the best designers, engineers with amazing portfolios reached out, and it's very

surprising that they were laid off. Browder is an immigrant himself and says H-1B workers are in a really tough spot. There is a flood of tech workers on the market right now and a lot of hiring freezes. Also, many places will hire a U.S. citizen over an H-1B worker. It's cheaper, less paperwork. Aditya Taude was up against this himself when he was laid off back in 2020. He started applying to every possible job, obsessing over every question in every interview. There was a lot of overthinking, I think, at that point because I was like, I need to answer all the questions correctly. What if I answer one question incorrectly and that is what decides my future in the States? Taude was applying around the clock.

Sometimes he would do five interviews in one day. First round, second round, it was a blur. Until one day, he got a job offer on email. How did you feel when you saw that email? I think I was bursting in tears of laughter. One email changed my life, and this other one has changed my trajectory again. Taude got the job with just 15 days to spare. Now he's trying to help H-1B holders who are in the same situation he was in two years ago, trying desperately to find a job with the clock ticking. That was NPR's Stacey Vanek-Smith.

Now, clearly things are really tough for tech workers right now, but jobs numbers in the overall economy are actually pretty strong. And we wanted to know why that was and whether those tech layoffs could be a sign of trouble for other industries. To find out more about this, I talked with Betsy Stevenson. She's a labor economist at the University of Michigan and served in the Obama administration. OK, so I want to start with the layoffs in the tech sector. Do you think those are indicative of a sector that is struggling right now think it's indicative of a sector that had gangbuster growth over the last couple years and maybe got a bit ahead of its skis, thinking that that growth was going to go on at that rate, sort of unstoppable rate, and maybe overhired in some areas. We've got sectors that have been slower to recover, like leisure and hospitality or education and health services. So I think you want to think

of this as a story of two parts of the economy. One part that recovered very fast out of the pandemic, and maybe got a little bit ahead of itself, and it's time to pause. And then we've got other parts of the economy that were very slow to recover. And we saw real stagnation in any kind of sectors that involved human to human contact. Well, when it comes to sectors that are still adding jobs at a pretty healthy pace, what specific sectors are we talking about that are still trying to fill positions? The two big buckets, it's leisure and hospitality and education and health. Okay.

And that's what made up two-thirds of the job growth that we saw last month, that we saw the previous month. It's not surprising for those sectors to have such strong growth. That's what they were doing prior to the pandemic. But they were very slow to come out. You know, we're still missing nearly a million workers in leisure and hospitality. And you want to drill down into occupations. We all know about the nurse shortage. So it's interesting to me that at the same time, we're seeing a lot of news stories about, oh, look at these layoffs at, you know,offs at CNN or let's look at these layoffs in the tech sector.

This is happening in the same few weeks that we've got a nurse calling 911 in an emergency room because she can't handle the patients. Okay. Well, since we always love asking economists crystal ball questions, how do you see this all playing out as you look ahead into 2023? You know, I'm an optimist. And I think that what we are learning is everything the government did to support workers during the pandemic, even conceding that that might have contributed somewhat to the inflation we're experiencing, I think still ultimately left us with a stronger economy because people have gone back to work. And I think we're going, I think still ultimately left us with a stronger economy because people have gone back to work. And I think we're going to continue to see very high rates of employment. I think we're still going to continue to see very low rates of unemployment, even if they go up a little bit. And I think we're going to see some continued adjustment, probably away from the goods producing sector

and towards the service sector as we bring back health care workers, restaurant workers, hotel workers. That was Betsy Stevenson, a labor economist at the University of Michigan who served in the Obama administration. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang. Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation. Working together to create a just world where all people have access to renewable energy, clean air and water, and healthy food. The Schmidt Family Foundation is part of the philanthropic organizations and initiatives created and funded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt to work toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all. On the web at theschmidt.org. Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic

support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org.