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.
\u201cSo yes, they are getting prosecuted, they are getting investigated, and that\u2019s the reason why some of them are packing their bags and closing their companies,\u201d 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 \u201cOptional Practical Training\u201d (OPT) work permits into an H-1B visa with its valuable path to U.S. citizenship.
\u201cThis is the most important point,\u201d one Indian graduate told Breitbart News. \u201cGraduates here are working on STEM OPT [work permits] \u2026 they\u2019re in their final or penultimate attempt [to win the H-1B lottery], and they\u2019re employed to a legitimate employer \u2026 They are the ones who are affected,\u201d said the graduate, who described himself as \u201cManohar from the Midwest.\u201d
\u201cI know people around me who are doing this,\u201d Manohar said, adding:
Since they\u2019re 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] \u2026 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.
\u201cAt least 500 of us on a subreddit group have been reporting these cases [to the government] \u2026 They said they\u2019re investigating them, but there has been no update whatsoever,\u201d he added.
The Facebook video shows Reddy reading questions from his online audience:
\u201cHave any employees been charged for colluding so far? What penalty are they looking at?\u201d 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\u2019s even though got them in the lottery. So all different things are going on.
And it\u2019s spreading around a lot of prosecution of these employers. Were employers prosecuted for [fraudulent] filing in 2021? Yes, they did \u2026. Two years ago, people, let\u2019s say for example, you\u2019re 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 \u201cI got my lottery.\u201d
But now, when the prosecution happens, when the revocation [of fraudulent visas] happens, they don\u2019t announce the information though. But yes, we do get the consultations. We do get the information. Unfortunately, we can\u2019t put them on the video. We can only put nice people on video because the bad people, they don\u2019t want to come on the video, and we don\u2019t want them [on video]\u2026 If a client is consulting us and filed for 17 [duplicate H-1B visas] and he got selected four or five times, we don\u2019t want to put that guy in there [on video].
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\u2019s Department of Homeland Security. \u201cThere 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,\u201d 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 \u2014 and nearly all are competing for H-1B work permits by working long hours at low pay.
The workers\u2019 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\u2019 DHS.
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 \u2014 related to fraud in the dentistry business \u2014 even though it has helped close other fraud cases.
However, there is no evidence that the government\u2019s 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\u2019 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 \u201cWe\u2019re working with the State Department and DHS \u2026 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.\u201d
Instead, the DHS\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2014 and out of the comfortable middle class.
The most important fraud is the \u201cLCA\u201d fraud.
This fraud occurs when employers claim that they need an H-1B visa to import a particular worker \u2014 or a bloc of workers \u2014 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 \u201cLabor Condition Application\u201d and is processed by the Department of Labor.
Congress has set minimal checks on the rubber-stamp LCA process. In 2021, Biden\u2019s 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. \u201cThe contractors [pocket] somewhere between 20 and 30 percent\u201d of the salaries paid by Fortune 500 companies, Manohar said.
\u201cThis is organized human trafficking,\u201d said Jay Palmer, a fraud expert and a civil rights advocate for Americans and immigrants. \u201cIf you don\u2019t know what you\u2019re seeing, it all looks legitimate,\u201d he told Breitbart News.
The problems are spotlighted in a video by the Center for Immigration Studies, he said. \u201cI was so happy to see that,\u201d Manohar said.
This fraud-ridden LCA process also allows Indian-born managers in the United States to quietly sell many Americans\u2019 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. \u201cChina is flying under the radar, big time,\u201d said Palmer.
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\u2019s 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 \u201cyou will become a bottleneck in the [kickback] chain. \u2026 [Senior managers] will fire you,\u201d he said. In contrast, mid-level American managers do not sell jobs, he said, adding, \u201cThere are very few honest Indian managers \u2014 maybe one in a million.\u201d
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 \u2013 and a continued mass layoffs of American professionals. The backlog may reach\u20021.8 million in the next few years, says an immigration lawyer.
When the Indian worker cannot do the American\u2019s 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\u2019 American salary, regardless of U.S. privacy or security rules.
The empty job at the subcontractor\u2019s 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 \u2014 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\u2019s ancient zero-sum caste culture which deters witnesses from speaking out. \u201cIt\u2019s too hard\u201d 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\u2002where Indian managers and CEOs have allegedly engaged in fraud.
Lottery Fraud
But Reddy\u2019s and Manohar\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.
\u201cThe 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,\u201d said Manohar, adding:
The major part of this fraud is happening from people who have done their bachelor\u2019s [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\u2019s 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\u2019s no way to track it back. How would USCIS go back and track back transactions in India?
Let me tell you something \u2014 they shell out their entire life savings in India to go to the U.S. \u2026 Everyone within the Indian community knows that. We all know it, but we\u2019re not sure how to get it to the public spotlight over here.
The fraud is pervasive, the Indian graduate told Breitbart News. Online, \u201cpeople are discussing it openly,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re openly doing it thinking that this is the process, it\u2019s fine to register multiple times.\u201d
A Facebook page shows Indian workers asking for advice about multiple H-1B applications and about companies that are recruiting workers for future projects:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u2026. and say \u201c\u2018This is fraud and you shouldn\u2019t be filing [fraudulent] petitions.\u201d But in the background, we know people who pay them a day consultation and then they say \u2018\u201dIt\u2019s good, fine, go ahead and file [the duplicate application]\u201d even though they know that they\u2019re committed fraud.
Everybody here knows, it\u2019s not a secret anymore. It\u2019s very open. Everybody knows they know it.
\u201cThis [lottery] fraud is growing rampant,\u201d said Manohar. \u201cLook at it this way. I mean, next year, there could be a million registrants or a million and a half registrants,\u201d he said, adding:
The visa is being used to import cheap labor, not for specialty occupations \u2026 It\u2019s impacting actual American workers. There are jobs which Americans should be taking up and they\u2019re more than skilled to do. \u2026 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 \u201ctop tier\u201d graduates. But the flood of cheap unskilled labor changes the incentives for executives and workforces at Fortune 500 companies, Manohar said. \u201cSince American workers are losing out on their jobs and Indian workers are coming in on cheap labor \u2013the bare minimum wage \u2014 there\u2019s no growth in innovation at all. It\u2019s just [the] bare minimum \u2014 if you ask a person to do Task X, that\u2019s all he does.\u201d
India\u2019s 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\u2019s university sector is corrupt. In April 2023, Bloomberg reported:
One Bhopal resident, twenty-five-year-old Tanmay Mandal, paid $4,000 for his bachelor\u2019s degree in civil engineering. He was convinced the degree was a pathway to a good job and a better lifestyle. He wasn\u2019t 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\u2019t answer technical questions at job interviews, and has been unemployed for the last three years.
The employability of new graduates \u201cis still a challenge,\u201d said Dileep Mangsuli, the director at Siemens Healthineers AG, a medical-technology company in India.\u201cTill they\u2019re trained and retrained and many times trained, they don\u2019t become employable,\u201d 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. \u201cThey would still be getting what they want if they just fixed the fraud and picked the eligible ones \u2014 they have all the data and information right in front of them.\u201d
Five hundred federal investors would help find, prosecute, and deter the labor fraud, said Palmer.
Meanwhile, India\u2019s Prime Minister Modi will attend a State Dinner at the White House on June 22.<\/p>\n\n\n\n