“Good morning, you’re fired and getting replaced by a software engineer from India with an H-1B visa … APRIL FOOLS!” This is a bad joke to play on an engineer these days, because it is just too close to actually being true.

Who are NOT the fools?

Some parties, however, have not been made fools of. In fact, they’ve been playing an April Fools prank on all Americans. Outsourcing companies, 7out of 10 from India, have played a bad joke on American engineers, American companies, American students, and American politicians, playing all of them for fools. The top 10 H-1B requestors of 2006 are all outsourcing companies, who use the H-1B program to train their junior engineers in America, and rotate them back to their country of origin to facilitate outsourcing contracts.  This is a list of the top 10 companies who applied for H-1B visas last year:

1. Infosys
2. Wipro
3. Cognizant
4. Patni
5. Mphasis
6. HCL America
7. Deloitte & Touche
8. Tata
9. Accenture
10. Satyam

International American-based corporations, Microsoft and IBM are numbers 15 and 18 respectively.

The chief of business and trade services for USCIS, Efran Hernandez, said, “ …there is no preference given to U.S. companies over non-U.S. companies. You have to be a U.S. employer … That doesn’t mean you have to be a U.S. company.”

Get the full story at Computer World Blog.