Revolver: It turns out the H-1B ‘lotto system’ is totally and completely rigged…
Indian "body shops" or staffing agencies crowd-out and overwhelm the lotto system with bogus/dubious applications for "contract" candidates
Sources include Revolver and various Internet searches:
The H-1B visa program allows employers to hire non-U.S. citizens for highly skilled jobs temporarily. The job openings can pay $140,000 per year, more or less, usually more. And the program is intended to bring premier international talent to US companies.
The visas are valid for three years but can be extended. Recipients must hold a bachelor’s degree or higher in a field related to their specialty.
Immigration services cap the number of new H-1B visas at 85,000 per fiscal year. In 2023, 72% of approved petitions were for people born in India, 12% for those in China, and 71% went to men, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
H-1B holders can also apply for a green card while on the visa.
When this H1B visa system was recently challenged as being a broken system, Elon Musk stepped in a huge pile of doge-shit (you see what I did there?) in his initial knee-jerk reaction defending the program, he told detractors:
“Take a big step back and F— YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
Whoa! He got into trouble immediately with a deluge of Conservative criticism. In our VERY new era of Techno Populism, Trump supporters and others gave Elon (and Vivek) a huge, real-time wake-up call about the program—which is really, really great! It’s almost as if we’re getting real time “voting” on nearly every issue by X followers! This is the “new democracy in action”— voting real-time about nearly every policy issue!! Great stuff!
Elon immediately softened his position and ultimately admitted that the program needs reform.
Revolver editors came out and explained why the H1B visa program is being gamed by Indian (and Chinese?) “body shops.”
Say you’re a regular American business that wants to hire a foreign student graduate from a top US university. You would lose the candidate to the lottery most (70%) of the time. Some 800,000+ applications per year are submitted for those 85,000 openings. Outsourcing and staffing firms are exploiting loopholes, crowding out US employers and immigrants who play it fair. Yes, the system is being scammed mostly by Indian “body shops” like this one:
“An outsourcing firm can draw from its vast workforce in India and put in 3X number of tickets. It doesn’t care who gets selected as long as somebody, anybody gets selected. @USCIS rules require a “legitimate job offer” for each lottery entry, but don’t require any proof.”
If they happen to snag some winning bids, which they do to some extent, then it’s possible that they’ll then try to find a real person to fill the position, or worse, they’ll send some Indian dude to computing programming 4 week computer programming “bootcamps” to give them some basic programming.
(Those computer programming “bootcamps” can be found here in the US. I believe it’s for a 4 week crash course. Tell your young friends and family about it if they want to “learn to code.”)
So, let’s say the position applied-for pays $140,000 per year (or more) on the H1B visa application, the body shop will pay the candidate, say $40,000 per year and the body shop pockets the difference! I don’t know how much this is happening, but Mr. Reddy, pictured above, clearly had a significant business to defraud the process—a business spoofing the US bureaucrats and companies. He placed 300 candidates since 2020, so, if you do the math, he might be making $30 MILLION DOLLARS or more—EACH YEAR—FOR YEARS. Obviously there huge incentive for fraud. This one guy got caught.
Here’s some corroborating inside information (again, most of this information is from the Revolver article linked above) from an X commentor:
Here’s the number of applications submitted for those 85K positions in recent years (from Revolver).
I’m not claiming any special knowledge of this issue. It’s my first time looking into this program. I did so because I know that nearly every US government program is corrupted and “F’d-up beyond all recognition.” That’s the meaning of ‘FUBAR’ by the way.
I’m not even sure how to fix the program, except to scrap it. There is no need for the government to be an intermediary in any hiring process. There’s no value-added by “government.” In fact, there is VALUE-DETRACTED! I will re-iterate that my opinion is not particularly informed about these programs.
But I worked in many foreign countries either directly through major oil and gas exploration/production companies or their selected contract agencies. Immigration approval is similar across the globe. Each country requires that the oil company or it’s staffing agency show that the foreign candidate has skills that no local candidates have. Everytime, my CV was submitted for review to the foreign government before being granted an Expat visa. Immigration officials typically have long working relations with these entities, so trust is developed over time.
Personally, in hiring high-level Chemical or Oil/Gas Process Engineering contract employees in a foreign setting, I’ve always asked job applicants highly technical questions, pertinent to the position, or about knowledge that anyone in oil/gas industry should know. First, they were often surprised that I would ask such things. But I did it in a fun way to not “freak-out” the candidate. But I was often shocked how many were unable to respond. I would give a hint or two to help or ask another question. I sometimes asked the candidate how he or she would go about to solve a hypothetical or real-life problem that we were having on our project.
Many times, I realized that they didn’t know the basic things—this from people claiming 20 or 30 years of engineering experience. They either lied on their CV or didn’t have real engineering experience of directly “doing the work.”
So many Indian and Chinese engineering graduates have Masters or Doctorate degrees, since that’s their cultures, but these advanced degrees are actually a sign of poor decision-making! In the US, you’ll ruin your career if go to graduate engineering school! This is true because most useful knowledge comes from real-life on-the-job work experience. What you learn in Universities is typically highly theoretical, not practical.
One time, I personally was in a job interview for a chemical engineering job, early in my career, and I was asked a highly technical question by an interviewer. I’ll never forget it. Sort of out of the blue, he asked me “why would you distill styrene in a vacuum distillation column?” I answered the question correctly, he stood up and offered me the position. I didn’t know anything about styrene, but I understood fundamental chemical engineering knowledge to answer his question correctly.