Immigration is a complex issue. Name calling doesn't solve anything.
Immigration is a complex issue. Name calling doesn't solve anything.
The whole idea that it would be wrong or humiliating to have to train someone who had the gall to be born in a different (and generally poorer) country is based on the notion that Americans should be treated with more regard than people born elsewhere. If Disney had fired 200 Americans and replaced them with 200 other Americans, would there have been an uproar? Almost certainly not. Since they only difference is the new workers' nation of origin, how is this not a xenophobic or racist reaction?
Lots of issues are complex but complexity is not an excuse for xenophobia.
If their replacements were white guys from Texas it would still be equally humiliating and offensive for people to be asked to train their lower-wage, less-skilled replacements as a condition for receiving severance. Come on. And unlike citizens, people on work visas have no real leverage to negotiate for higher wages (since their work visas are tied up with the company they work for or at least their ability to find a new sponsor), so the idea that they couldn't possibly suppress wages seems silly.
Let's say the foreign workers would have made the equivalent of $20k in their own country but will now make $60k for Disney in the U.S. vs. the American workers who made, say, $80k but will now end up settling for new jobs that only pay $60k (in addition to their unemployment, social security and subsidized health insurance and other social safety net features that the foreigners wouldn't have access to in their home countries). Are you really sure this is a bad thing for the world?
(By the way, the stylized figures above are very generous to your anti-immigration case, since while there is plenty of evidence that immigrants 2-3x their incomes by working in the U.S., there is no reason to believe that American's actually suffer 25% income losses to do competition from immigrants. Most studies show no change or a positive impact to native workers' wages and the few that show a negative impact show at most a ~5% decrease.)
Why do you think Disney would replace a ton of workers with inexperienced ones unless they're saving on wages?