Thousands of Americans in the information technology industry have reportedly been replaced by cheap foreign labor since a cap was raised on an immigration program, according to an exclusive Problem Solvers report.

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Local 6 News reported that two types of visas, the H1-B and L-1 visa programs, allow foreigners to come to the United States for employment and work in specialized fields like computer programming and software engineering.

H1-B visas allow U.S. companies, including federal contractors, to hire skilled foreign workers on a temporary basis to supply workers where they cannot find qualified Americans.

However, the technology workers, who are mostly from India, are not filling empty jobs but actually replacing qualified Americans, according to the report.

"H1-B's are allowed to come over and work but they're not supposed to displace Americans," Central Florida Siemens' worker Mike Emmons said.

Emmons said he was forced to train his foreign replacement before being laid off.

"These people are putting Americans out of work," Emmons said. "They brought the employees into a room and told them what was going happen and that they were going to train them and they held a carrot out and said if you don't stay and train them you won't get your severance.

Another Siemens worker, James Granberry, said that he was force to train his foreign replacement.

"So, they up front told you that you're not just being laid off, you're being replaced by other labor?" Problem Solver Steven Cooper asked Granberry.

"Yes, I was given a list objectives and one of my objectives was to train my replacement," Granberry said.

Local 6 News reported that workers blame an increase in the cap of H1-B visas.

Until the year 2000, the number of H1-B visas granted per year was limited to 65,000. However, Congress voted to raise the cap to 195,000.

Local 6 News reported that Congress raised the cap in 2001 after strong lobbying in part by the Information Technology Association of America.

ITAA conducted a survey of the job market and concluded there was a huge shortage of qualified I.T. workers.

The survey was used to convince Congress to raise the cap, which resulted in a wave of foreign worker immigration, Local 6 News reported.

"I believe its fraud from the ITAA," Emmons said. "Every night I go to bed and think about what our Congress has done to Americans. I go to bed and I just lay there and think, my God, they turned on us like this."

Cooper asked ITAA spokeman Harris Miller, "We've heard story after story of people who say that these people (foreigners) are not coming to fill new jobs or vacancies but they're coming to replace U.S. workers.

"I can't respond to every individual situation," Miller said. "I get those e-mails, too, from individuals. I'm sure they're frustrated."

Local 6 News reported that several large companies like Motorola, Lucent, General Electric and Bank of America laid off thousands of workers in 2001 while at the same time hired hundreds of H1-B workers from overseas.

"It all goes back to corporate citizenship, which doesn't exist today," Granberry said.

Siemens, in its response to the story, said that the company does not deny any of the issues raised in the Local 6 News report.

Siemens has disclosed that it does contract work out to a consultancy service which brings workers here to fill certain jobs.

The company said that it has taken these actions to operate the information technology function of its business more efficiently.

Siemens also said that it has so far helped five of the affected employees find other comparable positions in the company.

Cooper said, "While the company does distinguish between full-time employees and contractors, we should point out that its American contractors who say they've just been replaced with other contractors-- who happen to be foreigners.