Indian-born CEOs are closing their firms and fleeing back to India to escape charges of fraud in the annual lotteries for visas to import H-1B foreign contract workers, says a lawyer for many Indian-owned subcontractors and visa workers.
“So yes, they are getting prosecuted, they are getting investigated, and that’s the reason why some of them are packing their bags and closing their companies,” said Rahul Reddy, an immigration lawyer in Texas.
Reddy made his comments during an online question-and-answer session with Indian graduates who are worried about the federal investigations into the H-1B fraud in the annual lottery for 85,000 new H-1B work permits. The work permits are used to import lower-wage migrants to take the jobs needed by U.S. college graduates.
Many Indian graduates in India cooperate with the fraud because the H-1B visas put them on a long, indentured-service path to U.S. jobs, green cards, and citizenship.
But many other Indian graduates from U.S. colleges oppose the lottery fraud because it hinders their three legal chances to convert their “Optional Practical Training” (OPT) work permits into an H-1B visa with its valuable path to U.S. citizenship.
“This is the most important point,” one Indian graduate told Breitbart News. “Graduates here are working on STEM OPT [work permits] … they’re in their final or penultimate attempt [to win the H-1B lottery], and they’re employed to a legitimate employer … They are the ones who are affected,” said the graduate, who described himself as “Manohar from the Midwest.”
“I know people around me who are doing this,” Manohar said, adding:
Since they’re on their last year of the STEM OPT, they applied to the legitimate employer where they are employed and submitted another five, six applications through a consultancy [labor broker] … So they got a [fake] job offer [which is needed to apply for the lottery] which they know is bogus and everyone knows it is bogus.
“At least 500 of us on a subreddit group have been reporting these cases [to the government] … They said they’re investigating them, but there has been no update whatsoever,” he added.
The Facebook video shows Reddy reading questions from his online audience:
“Have any employees been charged for colluding so far? What penalty are they looking at?” Yes, there are a lot of companies that are under criminal investigation right now. We get a lot of contact from people who are getting criminally investigated, and employers getting investigated. Some of the employers are running away to India. Some of the employers are just closing the entire business. Some of the employers are not filing their H-1B’s even though got them in the lottery. So all different things are going on.
And it’s spreading around a lot of prosecution of these employers. Were employers prosecuted for [fraudulent] filing in 2021? Yes, they did …. Two years ago, people, let’s say for example, you’re a very nice guy, you only applied for one lottery [visa], and this other guy who applied for 10 lotteries, he got five or four selected. He was beating his chest and saying “I got my lottery.”
But now, when the prosecution happens, when the revocation [of fraudulent visas] happens, they don’t announce the information though. But yes, we do get the consultations. We do get the information. Unfortunately, we can’t put them on the video. We can only put nice people on video because the bad people, they don’t want to come on the video, and we don’t want them [on video]… If a client is consulting us and filed for 17 [duplicate H-1B visas] and he got selected four or five times, we don’t want to put that guy in there [on video].
Check out this video if you think you can escape by doing multiple H1b registrations.
Posted by Anonymous participant on Tuesday, June 6, 2023
Reddy is a founding member of the ITServe Alliance trade association that represents many Indian-born CEOs. Reddy declined to answer questions from Breitbart News.
The lottery fraud has been recognized since 2021 by top officials at President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security. “There is literally no [DHS] follow-up to fake filings that we can ascertain, and no effort is made by [DHS to] weed out folks who have filed multiple applications with multiple employers,” Charles Kuck, an Atlanta lawyer, told Breitbart News in 2021.
Much of the fraud is being conducted by Indian-born CEOs who run many of the second-tier or third-tier white-collar subcontracting under the Fortune 500.
The software sweatshops allow the Fortune 500 to replace American grads with disposable teams of indentured Indian workers. Many of the Indian workers in the subcontractor pyramids under the Fortune 500 companies are recent graduates of American universities with OPT work permits. But many are white-collar illegals — and nearly all are competing for H-1B work permits by working long hours at low pay.
The workers’ participation in fraud also traps many in the sweatshops. Their CEOs can use their prior frauds to block them from getting legal work permits that would help them pay off the huge debts that their families accepted to get the young men into U.S. jobs.
The lottery fraud is acknowledged by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency within Alejandro Mayorkas’ DHS.
USCIS is committed to preventing abuse of the H-1B registration process, by undertaking extensive fraud investigations and referrals for criminal prosecution. Only those who follow the law are eligible to file an H-1B cap petition.
To learn more, visit: https://t.co/8UTKU4l9w8
— USCIS (@USCIS) June 14, 2023
But officials say little about the fraud. The Department of Justice will periodically announce settlements with CEOs. It only displays one H-1B case for 2023 — related to fraud in the dentistry business — even though it has helped close other fraud cases.
However, there is no evidence that the government’s fraud investigation is intended to reduce the large-scale extraction of migrants from poor countries for use by the Fortune 500 and Wall Street.
On June 14, for example, Mayorkas’ DHS announced a policy change to let more visa workers keep working after their visa expires or stay after their temporary contracts end.
On May 15, a top White House official said “We’re working with the State Department and DHS … to make it easier for [migrants] that have these skill sets that we think can really contribute to implementing these new policies, that we can bring them in faster.”
Instead, the DHS’s fraud investigation is likely intended to assert federal control over the process. Elsewhere, Mayorkas justifies his legal changes to southern migration as a push to replace cartel smuggling networks with safer, government-run legal pathways into American workplaces and housing.
The federal silence about the H-1B fraud is also a diplomatic concession for India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. He is a strong backer of the H-1B program because it steers vast wealth to Indians and India. He will visit Biden on June 22 for a high-status state dinner when officials will announce high-tech sales to India in a quiet exchange for allowing more Indian graduates to take more U.S. jobs.
Visa Worker Fraud
There are many categories of visa worker fraud in the various H-1B, J-1, L-1, OPT, H4EAD, J-1, B-1/B-2, H1BI, E-3, E-2, and other visa programs. There are no firm caps on the inflow of foreign workers into the United States, ensuring a resident white-collar population greater than 1.5 million. This imported workforce inflates corporate profits and stock values, and it pushes most American graduates out of their technology careers — and out of the comfortable middle class.
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The most important fraud is the “LCA” fraud.
This fraud occurs when employers claim that they need an H-1B visa to import a particular worker — or a bloc of workers — who has a specific skill that cannot be hired in America and that the worker is needed for an existing contract or to fill a full-time job. This claim is dubbed a “Labor Condition Application” and is processed by the Department of Labor.
Congress has set minimal checks on the rubber-stamp LCA process. In 2021, Biden’s deputies canceled reforms established by President Donald Trump.
In practice, this LCA fraud allows the body shops to import blocs of low-wage, poorly trained Indian graduates to help them win future contracts by underbidding the employers who hire American graduates. “The contractors [pocket] somewhere between 20 and 30 percent” of the salaries paid by Fortune 500 companies, Manohar said.
“This is organized human trafficking,” said Jay Palmer, a fraud expert and a civil rights advocate for Americans and immigrants. “If you don’t know what you’re seeing, it all looks legitimate,” he told Breitbart News.
The problems are spotlighted in a video by the Center for Immigration Studies, he said. “I was so happy to see that,” Manohar said.
This fraud-ridden LCA process also allows Indian-born managers in the United States to quietly sell many Americans’ jobs to Indian graduates in exchange for a salary kickback, said Palmer.
But Chinese immigrants are also smuggling Chinese workers into U.S. jobs, said Palmer. “China is flying under the radar, big time,” said Palmer.
This is just one floor of Walmart out 3 floors where 1000 and 1000 opt(bentonville, AR)students(mostly fake) are working under 20 to 30$/h and killing white color jobs.
TCS, COGNOZANT, INFOSYS,only hire Indians. How many more proof do we need. ? pic.twitter.com/PquTPhXWYE— Agram Bagram bhooo (@S1S1B1) March 23, 2019
The job-selling process has been repeatedly described to Breitbart News by H-1B workers and U.S. managers.
It starts when managers fire an American professional, often when they reach age 40 and need higher salaries for their kids.
The managers, typically foreign-born managers, then offer the job to a same-country foreign visa worker who has been imported by one of the subcontracting companies. The deal is conducted in their home-country language and typically involves a kickback from the job’s salary to the hiring manager. The kickback is conducted outside the office, for example, at a main street business created by the hiring manager, or via a home-country transaction.
The employee knows the kickback is worth paying because the hiring manager is expected to nominate him for the huge prize of green cards and citizenship. That deferred bonus allows each foreign worker to move himself, his family, and his descendants out of poor India and into the United States.
Most of these transactions involve Indian-born managers in the United States and Indian migrants to the United States.
Indian hiring managers will sell jobs to Indians for $5,000 to $10,000, an Indian H-1B worker told Breitbart News in 2020. Honest Indian managers cannot stop the kickbacks, he said, because “you will become a bottleneck in the [kickback] chain. … [Senior managers] will fire you,” he said. In contrast, mid-level American managers do not sell jobs, he said, adding, “There are very few honest Indian managers — maybe one in a million.”
These quiet deals are creating a fast-growing population of Indian visa workers in U.S. jobs who are waiting for one of the 140,000 green cards each year – and a continued mass layoffs of American professionals. The backlog may reach 1.8 million in the next few years, says an immigration lawyer.
When the Indian worker cannot do the American’s former job, he is expected to hire a cheap India-based support expert to do it for him online. This service is widely advertised in India and is funded from the workers’ American salary, regardless of U.S. privacy or security rules.
The empty job at the subcontractor’s company is then refilled by the next wave of Indian H-1B workers.
This black market in U.S. white-collar jobs is routine and ubiquitous, partly because many U.S. executives prefer their back offices be filled with many subordinate Indians or Chinese instead of a few outspoken American professionals.
The scale is hidden because few Americans recognize the transactions — even when their jobs are sold to visa workers.
Also, the federal government does not want to investigate the foreign-language transactions and the covert kickbacks within the Fortune 500 labor pyramids. The U.S. government also knows that each investigation will likely end up back in India, whose trade policy is based on the unspoken swap of American jobs for exports of U.S. weapons, grain, and energy. The job transactions are also protected within India’s ancient zero-sum caste culture which deters witnesses from speaking out. “It’s too hard” for the feds to track, said Palmer.
U.S. professional journalists are powerless to notice, cover, and spotlight this black market in U.S. jobs, even as it hollows out the salaries and workplace clout of their own professional class. So editors hire U.S. journalists to police transgender pronouns instead of corporate visa fraud or middle-class outsourcing.
Breitbart News, however, has reported many lawsuits, legal settlements, and witness claims where Indian managers and CEOs have allegedly engaged in fraud.
Lottery Fraud
But Reddy’s and Manohar’s comments about lottery fraud are focused on a subsidiary type of fraud in the H-1B selection process.
The process is built on the federal lottery that randomly awards 85,000 new H-1Bs visas to a lucky minority of the several hundred thousand H-1B applicants.
Each candidate worker and CEO is expected to submit one request per year per candidate to the lottery because the LCA rules require them to claim each worker is uniquely skilled for a particular job.
But the vast majority of poor Indian workers are desperate to win the life-changing lottery. Also, the cost of applying for an H-1B visa is only $10, and the payoff is huge.
The result is that many thousands of Indian candidates and CEOs have cheated in the lottery since 2021 by submitting multiple applications per person.
A USCIS chart shows 52 percent of the applications for the current lottery are duplicates. The number of duplicative applications has spiked from 28,000 cases for 2021 visas up to 409,000 cases for 2024 visas.
Often, the H-1B applicants are willing to pay the application fees that should be paid by each sponsoring company, many of which are shell companies with networks run by cliques of Indian CEOs.
“The employer who is supposed to be paying the [H-1B] petitioning fees, he is going to collect money [from workers] in India, and USCIS has no way to trace it,” said Manohar, adding:
The major part of this fraud is happening from people who have done their bachelor’s [degree] in India, although I agree some here with masters [degrees from U.S. universities] are involved as well. But the major part of the scam is happening in India [with people] who have a bachelor’s degree. So they pay [the U.S. companies] in India for the filing [fees] and then [the U.S.] employers over here pays USCIS. I mean, there’s no way to track it back. How would USCIS go back and track back transactions in India?
Let me tell you something — they shell out their entire life savings in India to go to the U.S. … Everyone within the Indian community knows that. We all know it, but we’re not sure how to get it to the public spotlight over here.
The fraud is pervasive, the Indian graduate told Breitbart News. Online, “people are discussing it openly,” he said. “They’re openly doing it thinking that this is the process, it’s fine to register multiple times.”
A Facebook page shows Indian workers asking for advice about multiple H-1B applications and about companies that are recruiting workers for future projects:
The Facebook requests are answered with a variety of advice, including comments that workers who submit fraudulent claims are not being penalized.
The corrupt practices in the H-1B are aided by some Indian-born lawyers operating in the United States, Manohar said:
Even [some Indian immigration] lawyers, they come out …. and say “‘This is fraud and you shouldn’t be filing [fraudulent] petitions.” But in the background, we know people who pay them a day consultation and then they say ‘”It’s good, fine, go ahead and file [the duplicate application]” even though they know that they’re committed fraud.
Everybody here knows, it’s not a secret anymore. It’s very open. Everybody knows they know it.
“This [lottery] fraud is growing rampant,” said Manohar. “Look at it this way. I mean, next year, there could be a million registrants or a million and a half registrants,” he said, adding:
The visa is being used to import cheap labor, not for specialty occupations … It’s impacting actual American workers. There are jobs which Americans should be taking up and they’re more than skilled to do. … The U.S. graduates who have taken up such a huge loan for their education, how are they going to be able to work or pay it off?
The visa workers are often touted by U.S. investors as “top tier” graduates. But the flood of cheap unskilled labor changes the incentives for executives and workforces at Fortune 500 companies, Manohar said. “Since American workers are losing out on their jobs and Indian workers are coming in on cheap labor –the bare minimum wage — there’s no growth in innovation at all. It’s just [the] bare minimum — if you ask a person to do Task X, that’s all he does.”
India’s high-tech sector has grown enormously as U.S. companies use the visa workers programs to train Indians for jobs in India. But this growing Indian sector also means that many of the relatively few skilled Indians prefer to stay at home.
Most Indian graduates, however, have few skills partly because much of India’s university sector is corrupt. In April 2023, Bloomberg reported:
One Bhopal resident, twenty-five-year-old Tanmay Mandal, paid $4,000 for his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering. He was convinced the degree was a pathway to a good job and a better lifestyle. He wasn’t deterred by the fees that were high for his family, which has a monthly income of only $420. Despite the cost, Mandal says he ended up learning almost nothing about construction from teachers who appeared to have insufficient training themselves. He couldn’t answer technical questions at job interviews, and has been unemployed for the last three years.
The employability of new graduates “is still a challenge,” said Dileep Mangsuli, the director at Siemens Healthineers AG, a medical-technology company in India.“Till they’re trained and retrained and many times trained, they don’t become employable,” he told Bloomberg in June 23.
But there is an easy government fix to the cheap-labor racket, Manohar said: H-1B visas should be awarded to the companies that pay the highest salaries. “They would still be getting what they want if they just fixed the fraud and picked the eligible ones — they have all the data and information right in front of them.”
Five hundred federal investors would help find, prosecute, and deter the labor fraud, said Palmer.
Meanwhile, India’s Prime Minister Modi will attend a State Dinner at the White House on June 22.
Council on Foreign Relations
