Imagine getting a layoff notice, then being ordered to train your replacement.

That’s what has happened to hundreds of information technology employees at Southern California Edison. Since last summer, Edison, which serves nearly 14 million customers, has been firing its domestic IT workers and replacing them with outsourced employees from India.

In doing so, the utility is exploiting a gaping loophole in immigration law, which Congress has failed to close despite years of warnings that it’s costing thousands of American jobs.

The Indian workers are brought in on H-1B visas, which are temporary work permits for “specialty occupations” — those requiring “highly specialized knowledge” and a bachelor’s degree.

The purpose is to allow employers to fill slots for which adequately trained Americans aren’t available, not to replace existing workers with cheap foreign labor. That’s why employers such as Google and Microsoft, which say they’re short of highly trained software engineers, have lobbied hard to expand the program beyond the 65,000 visas available annually. These high-tech companies say they can’t meet their needs from the pool of U.S. graduates in STEM specialties — science, technology, engineering and math.

But Edison is using the program for a different purpose — to cut its wage costs, possibly by as much as 40%, according to data compiled by Ron Hira, a public policy expert at Howard University.

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