Working Visa fraud
By Pulkit Sharma

The US Government’s Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has just released a report detailing the extent of irregularities in the H-1B working visa in that country.

While everyone knew that a few body shops and tech companies were rorting the system,  it was a shock to see that as many as 1 in every 5 H-1B visa  had elements of  fraud or some technical violation.

Government investigators picked up 246 H-1B visa applications and investigated each one in great detail.  As many as 51 cases within 246 were confirmed as being a fraud, a technical violation and/or multiple technical violations.

Of the 51 H-1B visas with irregularities, 33 were outright fraud and the remaining 18 had some kind of technical violation.

The H-1B applicants had the same complaints commonly heard in HR forums i.e. being paid less, deposits not being returned and in many cases forced to work in a different American city than what their paperwork showed.  One H-1B holder was found to be working in a Laundromat.

Before the current financial crisis, the US Govt had an annual quota of 85,000 H-1B visas with an additional 20,000 for people who have studied in America.  The current financial tsunami in USA will ensure that H-1B visas numbers are not increased in the near future.

When this US report was released yesterday, a number of American newspapers ran the story.  But the American media censored its negative comments about India.  Techgoss can publish the reports findings about India which said:  “USCIS looked at country demographics and found that among the sample size of 246,  as many as  114 (46 percent) were born in India.  Among this sample 25 percent of the cases were associated with some type of fraud or technical violation.”

It is surprising that the American media will happily attack local tech personalities and their failings, but hold back if India and other Asian countries are involved for fear of being labeled xenophobic or racist.