H-1B visa fraud alive and well amid efforts to crack down on abuse The US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) last October proposed new rules to reform the H-1B visa program following its acknowledgement of widespread fraud in April last year. At that time, USCIS, part of the Department of Homeland Security, announced it had "undertaken extensive fraud investigations" based on …
I came over to the US on an H-1 about 40 years ago and getting this visa wasn't a matter of winning a lottery. I had to have significant skills in my field -- a postgraduate degree plus significant work experience -- and my employer had to not only demonstrate that they couldn't hire locally and they were willing to pay me the same as they'd pay an American citizen. Although this sounds like a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy it wasn't that difficult to sort out -- I was recruited by a small company along with a lot of other British people, many of us going on to get immigrant visas and eventually US citizenship.
So when did the change happen and why isn't anyone surprised that the entire system has been gamed from top to bottom?
It started in the early nineties with Indian outsourcing firms, at least according to the article. It's not suprising becasue this has been going on so long, at this point.
Honestly, i have learned to not apply to any job if the recruiter has an Indian looking name. Not that I have a problem with people from India, it's just that every time the first question in those situations are always about visa status. When you tell such a recruiter you are actually a citzen, the job is suddenly too advanced for you, if you hear anything back at all. Every. Single. Time. Same question, Same answer, same result.
The same happens if I go to interview and find out the staff is all H1-B (Management in these cases are often citizens, must be too hard to find someone with those elusive skills). About the only way you are getting that job is if they cannot find anyone with H1-B to do it (there is an H1-B skills gap out there, yanno). If you do get the job, there are some sotries out there to make you think twice about showing up. Those H1-B's are really valuable to folks and they don't want to see a citizen in the spot that could go to family or friends.
I don't blame the folks on the bottome. Heck, if I was in their spot, I would do the same. However, the companies running the fraud are terrible for doing it, all around, they wind up causing damage to just about everyone but themselves.
You used to have to prove there were no suitable applicants by advertising the job and collating the replies. Writing the job description so that no applications would be received was a bit of an art form but not too difficult for the sheer imbalance between qualifications and actual job requirements.
I wouldn't work for one of those outsourcing companies even if they did offer me a job because they're used to treating their employees like crap. But the mere fact you applied means that you have to be considered. Here you might run at a bit of a disadvantage since my parents -- who used to work on the subcontinenet -- were well up to speed with the idea of a free market in qualifications, i.e. "If CIS needs paperwork "x" then "x" can be obtained for a price". Some immigration departments are up to this -- the UK seems to be on top of dubious qualifications from even more dubious schools -- but its definitely a Whack-a-Mole job, you get one and a dozen more pop up.
BTW -- Coming to the US for work isn't what it used to be.
That is how the program is supposed to work, and I think anyone except the most ardent xenophobic 4th string vatnick would have no problem with it. If there's only maybe a hundred people in the world who have a certain set of skills, and you're running a company that needs someone with those skills... no problem. However, a lot of H1-Bs these days go to people who do hell desk type work, where you can walk into almost any Jr. High or High School in the US and find at least a dozen kids who could do that job, but companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, and so on, all swear up and down they can't find anyone to work for them. Then they pay lobbyists to make sure Congress ties both hands and a leg behind the back of any agency that might have oversight, so they can't do anything about it. A favorite tactic of Republicans is to put riders into bills to zero out the enforcement budget. So, while the agency is charged with enforcing the law, they're prohibited, by law, from actually spending so much as a single penny on actually enforcing the law. You saw this a few years ago when they wanted to zero out the budget for the IRS (the tax people for those in other parts of the world) because one IRS agent was auditing a couple of suspicious conservative groups trying to claim to be tax-exempt non-profits. Granted the guy went a bit rogue, and also granted that it was just an excuse to let their wealthy patrons (like their orange jeebus) cheat even more on their taxes without having to worry about being held accountable, but it's a common tactic of theirs.
The sponsoring company is SUPPOSED to have a job already lined up for the applicant. So they come over on a flight and show up for work the following day sort of thing. It tends not to work out that way with companies trying to game the system in various ways. The article mentions how sometimes they may have 5-6 people living in a single bedroom apartment and only one of them may actually be working at any given time. The rest just sit around all day waiting for an assignment.
Visas are a scarce resource. Some companies would hugely benefit from bringing in semiconductor engineers to run their new $bn fab. Some want to bring in cheap employees, underpay them and use them for low value work.
Fortunately we have a whole science of allocation of scarce resources among those who would realize most value. In your language it is called "reflected sound of underground spirits"
So if only America could be persuaded to become capitalist we could have companies simply bid for H1 places. Highest bidder wins.
The H1-B arena has been massively corrupt for many years. In Silicon Valley I had several go-arounds with rep Anna Eshoo, a major supporter of the fraud. To her, none of the major employers could do no wrong. To stop the abuse we need to get rid of the grifters. In California however, you cannot become a politician without embracing the grift machine.
《Well you could drain the swamp but you'd have to bring in a bunch of Dutch engineers》
Heracles for the shovel work and Jo. Bazalgette to design a sewer system to dispose of malodorous excreta of the US body politic. (No real risk any of these three could get a visa. :)
Someone mentioned: a puppet of a mastermind - has to better than a muppet of pastermind - at least with a shadowy mastermind some actual brains are involved.
@missing semicolon:
>> She's been knocking around California representing various districts (how does that work?) since 1993.
She will have served in districts drawn after the censuses of 1990, 2000, and 2010, and I suppose will run this fall in one drawn after the 2020 census. Since the 1960s, state legislatures have had to draw districts that are roughly equal in population, and every census brings an adjustment.
This is not to say that one can't gerrymander to some degree--there was a North Carolina congressman who said he could drive down the interstate with both doors open and hit every one of his constituents.
As for service since 1993, that's a short-timer by the current standards. Senator Grassley (R-IA) was first elected in 1981.
The last couple of years we've frequently found that H1B spouses (H4s with unrestricted employment authorisation) are being setup with false LinkedIn profiles, to then apply for remote jobs that their over-employed H1B partners will work. We found near identical, template based LI profiles and resumes from dozens of applicants for developer positions, and we found in some cases the partners (H1B) worked for the same US companies, placed by the same agencies. The efforts were clearly orchestrated, we would see the same consistent pattern of fraudulent applications each time we posted a new position.
When interviewing the spouses they were getting off-camera prompting on how to answer, their screens during tech interviews were clearly being remotely controlled and they could not explain what they were pretending to type. Positions and qualifications in the LI profiles / resumes were always difficult to verify, they would sometimes point to someone else's vendor certifications (including their spouse's) and claim any name differences were because they anglicised their name on moving to the US. We found applicants with no work history in common giving the same professional references.
Poke around online and you'll find H1Bs boasting about using this scam to OE two, three even four concurrent jobs, often senior dev or architect positions - via their spouse's EAD - you'll even find advice on how to offshore some of the OE work.
They're not fooled, they're just looking at how the H1-B person can't just up and quit on them for another job like an American citizen could, and they don't have to pay them as much, so it's win-win for upper management. It's basically slavery, but with extra steps.
You'd also weed out conservatives as they have no concept of humor. I know it may not seem like a bad thing at first blush, but there'd be no end to their whining about it, not to mention endless conspiracy theories, each one more batshit crazy than the last, and the more divorced from reality it is, the more popular it becomes.
《They should introduce a CAPTCHA where you have to pick out the irony, then we could weed out foreigners from American candidates》
Never struck me that subtle humour was an defining american trait. Anything more intellectual than slapstick requires a laughter track.
Identifying the irony probably ticks the un-/non-american box, whereas identifying black humour or self deprecating humour probably ticks the bloody limey box. An aussie box ticker would get past the captcha etc just to tell the offerer to shove it.... etc etc.
There was (is?) some rorting of the skilled visa/migration programs in AU but apparently nowhere near the extent that comparable US programs have been abused.
I see the odd US article on the parlous state of US STEM education and the low domestic participation rates in professional engineering and science courses. Who can blame students enrolling in Uni/College for avoiding those careers for ones in Law, Medicine, Veterinary Science, Political Science, Arts, Macrame etc? Plumbers, Auto mechanics & electricians, and electrical trades have even better prospects.
>Never struck me that subtle humour was an defining american trait. Anything more intellectual than slapstick requires a laughter track.
I never said which box identified the Americans
>Identifying the irony probably ticks the un-/non-american box,
Bingo
> Who can blame students enrolling in Uni/College for avoiding those careers for ones in Law, Medicine,
I was a researcher at Caltech many years ago.
A prof from UCLA told me that all his science grad students were kids of first generation Chinese/Indian immigrants, except the Russians who had left after the wall came down.
He was worried that if the IVY league law/medical schools weren't racist and let in the same students the USA would be fscked - because there would be nobody left doing science.
In about 1980, I remember seeing a help-wanted ad in the newspaper. The job seemed to be require that one be the very model of a modern major general, and also be fluent in Chinese. The salary advertised was about what a secretary might earn. I found this bizarre. Years later I learned that work visas went to those who had skills that no American citizen could offer at a comparable rate.
H1Bs are basically a mechanism to allow American companies to hire employees from other countries in order to bypass American workers who expect a living wage by American standards. American companies routinely put on a melodramatic fantasy show about there being too few "qualified" American workers, but in this case "qualification" means being willing to work for less than a fair wage.
The Trump administration felt that leaving it to pure luck which foreign workers will obtain H-1Bs in a given fiscal year is an inherently flawed and unfair process. In November 2020, Trump’s DHS published a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) that proposed ... H-1B visas would be allocated based on salaries offered rather than at random. [Center for Immigration Studies, Low-immigration, Pro-immigrant]
Not unexpectedly, it had taken Trump all of 4 years to take action, leaving it as a "this is what you will get if I am re-elected" proposition - which doesn't necessarily mean it would have been implemented as stated if he had been re-elected. Biden was elected and the new rules were withdrawn - wait to see some movement now the election is approaching.
You mean like that replacement for Obamacare he was just putting the final touches on before the 2016 election, that we still haven't seen? I mean, even if we assume he was too busy as POTUS, even though he seemed to be a part-time POTUS at best, what's he been doing the last couple of years? Besides fomenting a failed violent coup, steal highly sensitive classified documents and store them in a gaudy AF bathroom, and cheat at golf? I mean, most of his legal problems didn't really start until over a year after he lost the election and failed to take power with violence. Surely he could have found a few hours in all that time to finish it up and publish it.
H1-B and other programs of its ilk should not exist and have been a fraud since its inception.
The trouble is both parties have moneyed constituents who benefit from the exploitable labor and salary depression.
Trumpy tried to do something about it and received an excessive amount of flack from both parties.
Its no wonder Joe Biden lifted restrictions on visas within his first week in office.
This reminds me a bit of a company I worked for once upon a time. A few months before I left they signed a contract with HCL to take over pretty much their entire IT department. Most of the IT staff was summarily fired, though a few with critical knowledge were forced to become HCL employees, doing their old job for less pay.
While I wasn't around to see a lot of the fallout, what I saw was not pretty, and I kept in touch with some of my former coworkers and would hear stories that gave the distinct impression things didn't miraculously get better. Like most large consulting firms, they come in with their best and brightest people who know their subject area forwards, backwards, upside down, inverted, you name it. Exactly the sort of person who should qualify for an H1-B. Then, before the ink is even dry on the contract, those people are being shipped off to the next prospective mark customer and they hire a bunch of people fresh out of college or something, given them zero training or support, and basically just throw bodies at the problem. I'm sure the C-Suite execs were scheduling rotator cuff surgery after all the high fives they were giving each other about the money they would save the company, and based on what I heard, it probably ended up delaying a lot of new products significantly and generally costing the company more money over the long term. But they improved the P:E ratio on the stock price that first quarter, so they got their bonuses, and that's basically all that matters in the modern corporate world.*
I have no problem with the H1-B visa program as a concept. If there's only a hundred or so people in the world who have the skills you need, bringing someone over on a work visa is no problem. The problem comes when companies like HCL bring people in on these visas for entry level jobs. Not just entry level jobs, but the kind of entry level jobs where there's just no way companies can seriously claim that they can't find enough people to fill open positions. How many H1-B visa holders are doing tech support roles? The sort of role where you can walk into almost any Jr. High or High School and not be able to throw a rock without hitting a kid who could do the job just as well. Universities all over the country are churning out IT grads by the thousands every year, but somehow we're supposed to believe Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and all the others can't seem to get a single one of them to work for them? It beggars belief.
The solution is rather simple, robust enforcement and massive penalties for bad actors. The problem comes in finding politicians who value doing what's right for their constituents over making sure they win re-election next term and living the good life on the lobbyist's dime.
* At that same company, I was once in a meet and greet with a new SVP of IT, and I'll never forget him lamenting how the company could be "a $200 stock." This was a major brand name in the healthcare world. If you work in a hospital, lab, doctor's office, or pharmacy, you almost certainly have heard of this company. They go by two letters, both of which are within the first 5 letters of the alphabet. I have no objections to them wanting to make a profit, but being so focused on a specific stock price is something else entirely. It left a bad taste in my mouth then, and to this day, even though I'm no longer there, and I'm pretty sure that SVP only stuck around a few months. This same company, shortly after I left, laid off my boss' boss, then almost immediately hired someone to do the exact same job, just with a slightly different title to get around laws preventing them from filling positions of laid off workers for a full calendar year. They went almost 100 years without ever having a single layoff to having annual layoffs no matter how well the company might be doing.
There's not only shenanigans about applicants for H-1Bs, but since there's a requirement that companies post jobs domestically before resorting to offshore help, there's also a cottage industry to help Big Corp craft said job req's to preclude any US applicants from meeting the requirements, at which point the corp's are regretfully forced to go offshore for the talent.
Echo the previous comments about bringing in H-1Bs for entry-level helldesk & coding gigs which could be done by any recent graduates of high school/community college. But *those* folks want a working wage and could jump ship for better pay whenever it suits them.
Not too long ago, the H1B program had a grant funding portion that provided additional training for citizens that was supposed to provide support to training programs, public and private, as long as it was tech related. Trainers and their facilities were compensated based on attendance.
I made a few friends attending these training sessions which were Cisco, Microsoft or Oracle curriculum, either official or close parallels.
After the usual shady bookkeeping and double-counting of students to claim H1B training benefits, the grants to training programs were dropped and a few local training outfits disappeared.
It's not at all surprising that grift continues to survive in anything related to the H1B visas. It's the way of most government programs.
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