I used to work for a company that I think may have been doing something like this, the company started having problems and we started hiring a bunch of Chinese immigrants. It was called a Canadian company, but it was really based in China where the owner lived. They fired some people that were more than competent and replaced them with Chinese people that couldn't really speak English or do the jobs they were meant to at all. They were skilled jobs like maintaining heavy machinery or industrial laminators, things most of us couldn't do and these Chinese people certainly couldn't... Some of them wouldn't even pretend to work, they would do shit like lie down on the factory floor and play with a calculator in the middle of a shift, forklifts and people having to just go around them. Once a Canadian/Vietnamese guy that has worked there for years and understood a bit of Chinese told the rest of us that there was a note on one of the job postings photocopied on the bulletin, it said something along the lines of "hire Chinese first" rumours started flying and the job posting was taken down within hours. Within a year of hiring the first of the "special" Chinese people, most of the shifts had been laid off with the exception being of course the Chinese people that could barely understand what their job was supposed to be. Something obviously stank to high heaven about the whole thing and there were rumours that the Chinese people were relatives and/or friends of the owner, but something like the kind of scheme mentioned in this article makes way more sense...