By now, the myth of the need for imported high-tech labor is busted. There’s no shortage of skilled labor here, and we’ve run multiple stories highlighting the ways in which government and tech companies collude to import foreign labor — not because it’s needed, but because it’s cheap.

As laid-off American tech workers train their foreign replacements and begin seeking jobs elsewhere, a few have wised up and decided to sue, alleging their former employers have discriminated against them because they’re American.

It’s a recent trend, but the nonplussed, out-of-work tech workers are beginning to sue “in increasing numbers,” Computer World’s Patrick Thibodeau wrote recently:

What’s being challenged, in sum, is the job replacement system created by the H-1B program. U.S. IT workers, as a condition for their severance, are being made to train H-1B visa-holding contractor replacements to take over their jobs. The contractors often work for IT services firms that employ large numbers of H-1B workers. Most of these workers are from India and regional countries. This practice of replacing U.S. workers with foreign workers constitutes national origin discrimination, say its critics.

Thibodeau cites fresh lawsuits against Disney, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services, with each case moving forward thanks to federal judges who, “in each of the cases have given a green light for the plaintiffs to proceed after rejecting dismissal efforts.”

The plaintiffs’ attorney in the Disney suit flat-out accuses the company of discriminating against the laid-off employees on the basis of their national origin, telling Computer World they “were terminated because they were American citizens and all their replacements were foreign-born Indians.”

Earlier this year, H-1B abuse got perhaps its biggest airing when utility company Southern California Edison was excoriated for asking Americans who’d just been laid off to train their foreign replacements.

Tech companies insist — often with lawmakers fully in agreement — that there exists a shortage of American STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) workers, and that it only makes sense to widen current restrictions on the H-1B program so that more foreigners can enter the U.S. to pick up the slack. Qualcomm made exactly that claim back in August.

But if that were the case, wages would reflect that critical shortage — and the prospect of an American STEM worker having to train his less-costly replacement would be all but unthinkable.

“There’s no evidence of any way, shape, or form that there’s a shortage in the conventional sense,” one policy professor told Bloomberg. “They [tech companies] may not be able to find them at the price they want. But I’m not sure that qualifies as a shortage, any more than my not being able to find a half-priced TV.”