I’ve seen the real H-1B scam — it’s not what you think

I soon met with a assemblage acquaintance — let’s telephone him Vishal — who had recovered a occupation astatine my institution arsenic an Information Technology (IT) consultant. He crashed astatine my place, and we commuted together. At the office, though, we ignored each other. While walking to a adjacent cafe for lunch, we took antithetic routes to support the charade. Because, hired by a mom-and-pop IT “body shop”, Vishal had embellished his resume with six years of experience.

Every time astatine lunch, helium described his deceits: How helium deflected yet different task, however helium contrived yet different excuse, however helium survived yet different day. It felt similar talking to a firm spy— oregon watching a real-life web series. Every lunchtime, a caller episode. Once, Vishal had to interrogation 2 IT professionals successful India. How did helium cognize what to ask? “Simple, a Google search.” What astir selecting the close applicant? “I flipped a coin.” His manager successful the US, an Indian man, erstwhile asked him, “Do you person the acquisition listed connected your resume?” Vishal froze.

The US has thousands of IT assemblage shops — owned by Indians, luring Indians — that unit their employees to fake resumes, put “proxy” interviews, photoshop migration documents, wage visa fees, motion coercive contracts, and overmuch more. Besides relinquishing their identities, specified H-1Bs languish successful squalid “guesthouses”, conflict harrowing debts, look deportation threats, and gain thing erstwhile they don’t person clients. In fact, they wage their employers’ taxes to conscionable the rules of the H-1B programme. The 18th period has returned: Indians person been enslaved by a institution — this clip by chap Indians successful a overseas land.

Vishal struggled and survived and flourished; my American colleagues mislaid their jobs successful a bid of lay-offs. Corporate America’s cruelty made maine restless. Even though my leader treated maine well, dissimilar Vishal’s, the H-1B programme had shackled me, too. If I got fired, I’d lone get a fewer weeks to find enactment to support my migration status. If my steadfast applied for a greenish card, it deterred maine from taking a caller job, arsenic it would reset the decades-long waiting period. I wasn’t myself successful the US — I wasn’t allowed to be. My quest for dignity had made maine a pawn.

So, aft dreading and readying for a year, I discontinue my job, flew to Mumbai, and darted similar a madman — a escaped antheral — to my latent romance: movie writing. Three dreamy years later, successful 2016, I began moving connected a nonfiction book. The thought had travel to maine successful a blink: The maltreatment of the H-1B programme. Back then, I lone knew that immoderate atrocious (Indian) apples — the IT assemblage shops — had tainted an different just system.

It took maine respective years to recognize that it was each rotten.

Corporate America has concealed the existent H-1B scam with large ingenuity, diverting our attraction to a “scam wrong a scam”. Professor Norman Matloff, who has researched the impermanent idiosyncratic programme for implicit 3 decades and testified earlier Congress, calls it the “Intels Good, Infosyses Bad” story — oregon “racial scapegoating”. The visa maltreatment besides implicates American firms. Their grounds of suppressing wages — and favouring H-1Bs implicit Americans — is good documented successful quality articles, probe papers, and tribunal cases. What’s worse? It’s legal.

So Elon Musk is flat-out incorrect erstwhile helium says the H-1B programme is “broken”. It is functioning arsenic intended: Permitting corporations to underpay overseas workers, snub American professionals, and mint money. The H-1B Visa Reform Act of 2004, for instance, restructured the wage slabs — inserting 2 wage levels, astatine the 34th and 50th percentiles of the full salaries surveyed for an concern successful an area, beneath the highest (the 67th percentile) — embedding underpayment successful the instrumentality itself. The Department of Labor adjacent allows firms to acceptable the prevailing wage levels. Laced with loopholes, they alteration companies to bargain wages portion complying with the law.

The Musk-MAGA clash has revealed 2 contentious issues: That the US suffers from a “STEM crisis” and that radical bias drives each H-1B critics. Both notions are false. The endemic occupation of fake resumes itself — which I recovered during my reporting and probe — negates galore H-1Bs’ “best and the brightest” tags. The pro-visa campy besides cites a debased unemployment fig to render American techies irrelevant to the discussion. But a insubstantial by the Bureau of Labor Statistics researcher Carolyn Veneri posited that the machine subject field, which ejects immense numbers of programmers, made the unemployment complaint meaningless. So a “former engineer, present a income clerk astatine Radio Shack,” summarised Matloff, counted arsenic an “employed income person, not an unemployed engineer”. In the precocious 1980s, the National Science Foundation produced a flawed survey connected an imminent “STEM crisis” — which sparked a Congressional probe and influenced the Excellence successful Mathematics, Science, and Engineering Education Act of 1990. Why did the Act matter? It created the H-1B programme.

Age favoritism dominates this full messiness (though galore IT assemblage shops indulge successful radical discrimination, too). Young professionals gain less, request less benefits, and, without marital responsibilities, toil overtime. At a median property of 33, H-1Bs marque the firms drool.

How bash we devise a solution then? By recognising the victims — connected some sides. After years of unemployment, Virgil Bierschwale, an IT contractor, created a data-crunching website successful 2007 to find the “villains” of his life. He called it Keep America At Work. Six years later, an Indian H-1B worker, Kumar Pandruvada, started a YouTube channel, Kumar Exclusive, to exposure the scam. In January 2015, Virgil, inactive unemployed, discovered Kumar’s channel, and they became friends and allies — quasi-investigative journalists. They understood what galore haven’t: That successful the satellite of capitalism, lone 2 countries exist, 1 of corporations, the different of workers.

The writer’s forthcoming book, Wild Wild East, is astir the systemic maltreatment of the H-1B programme