The Department of Justice arrested an Indian CEO when he flew into Sea-Tac airport and charged him with using the H-1B visa-worker program to “compete unlawfully in the market.”
The secret investigation and arrest highlight what critics say is endemic fraud and corruption in the Indian-dominated H-1B visa-worker program. “The criminal complaint describes how two companies incorporated by [CEO Pradyumna Kumar Samal] in 2010 and 2011, engaged in a scheme sometimes referred to as a ‘bench-and-switch’ scheme, to exploit foreign-national workers, compete unlawfully in the market, and defraud the U.S. government,” said the statement from the Department of Justice. The CEO, Pradyumna Kumar Samal, allegedly lied to federal agencies when he said the visa-workers were imported for existing contracts, and he allegedly effectively forced his Indian employees to work for less than the promised wage-levels, said the statement: Nearly 200 workers may have been brought in under the phony applications. The employees were forced to pay SAMAL’s companies a partially-refundable “security deposit” of as much as $5,000 for the visa filings, regardless of whether they were assigned to any projects that provided them with income. Since 2014, Samal’s two companies have asked for roughly 700 H-1B visas and six green cards, according to MyVisaJobs.com . The 700 requests are likely to have gotten 200 visas for foreign workers who can be subcontracted at very low rates out to other technology firms in the Seattle area. One of the companies, Divensi , says it has worked with Amazon, Alaska Airlines, Microsoft, Physicians Interactive, Tesla, Nordstrom and the University of Washington.
The H-1B visa program was created to allow companies to import temporary workers until Americans could be trained for the jobs. But lobbyists persuaded Congress to gradually convert the program into an outsourcing program that imports roughly 100,000 low-wage foreign college-graduates per year. The estimated number of H-1B workers in the United States ranges from 450,000 up to 900,000, partly because many H-1B workers will extend their work visas — even when they are working for lower wages — because they hope to get the huge bonus of green cards. The number of former H-1B workers who now have green cards or citizenship is also very large, and it includes the current CEOs of Google and Microsoft.The cheap-labor program is widely used and strongly defended by many companies, including Amazon and Microsoft, by many universities and hospitals, and by investors’ lobby groups, such as FWD.us . These CEOs and investors can use the visa programs to spike their stock prices by outsourcing the jobs held by many mid-career Americans to the Indian companies, which then use their U.S.-based visa-workers to outsource the work to even cheaper workers living in India. Many GOP and some Democratic legislators support this double-outsourcing program, including Kansas GOP Rep. Kevin Yoder. He is pushing his HR 392 legislation into the 2019 spending bill that would put roughly 400,000 Indian and Chinese H-1B visa-workers — plus their families and relatives — on a fast-track to green-cards. If passed, the Yoder legislation would further increase the supply of white-collar workers competing for jobs in the United States. The various visa programs, including H-1B, OPT, H4 EAD, L-1, TN, and J-1 programs, keep a population of roughly 1.5 million foreign graduates employed in the United States as managers, recruiters, scientists, programmers, engineers, doctors, accountants, therapists, and designers. These huge labor programs help to lower salaries for many American college graduates and to push many skilled American workers into new, low-tech, lower-wage careers, such as journalism. The visa-worker programs allow the Indian-born CEOs in the U.S. to transfer many Indian tech-workers to the United States for subcontracting jobs, including many contracts that the companies hope to win during the next year. But the H-1B rules bar this “bench and switch” practice and require companies to justify each new request for a visa against an existing job. Nonetheless, many Indian and U.S. companies import H-1B workers and use their very low salaries to win a variety of contracts that would otherwise have gone to American consultants. The Seattle Times cited the federal indictment’s description of Samal’s alleged violation of those visa rules: Samal appeared to get pushback from a client after the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), part of the Department of Homeland Security, started investigating Samal. The CEO of a client company used in the [H-1B visa] application letters emailed Samal after USCIS contacted him, according to the case. “I received this email from the Visa office asking if I signed this,” the email from a CEO, identified in court documents as V.K., reads. “I did not. I don’t even know who this resource is. This is concerning? Pls advise on how this happened?” Sarah Blackwell, the founder of a pro-American group, Protect US Workers, Tweeted:
Sara Blackwell@4US_Workers
“Bench and switch” - It has a phrase it is so common. We need more policing.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/redmond-ceo-charged-with-fraud-on-more-than-100-h-1b-visa-applications/ …
2:55 PM - Aug 30, 2018 ·
Manhattan, NY
Redmond CEO charged with fraud on more than 100 H-1B visa applications The Justice Department charged Pradyumna Kumar Samal, the chief executive of Redmond firms Divensi and Azimetry, with using a tactic called “bench-and-switch” to fraudulently get high-tech visas.seattletimes.com
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The American critics of the visa-worker programs are trying to block Yoder’s
HR 392 fast-track legislation, partly by arguing that it will allow Indians managers to discriminate against Americans, and so push more Americans away from technology careers. The American groups include
Protect US Workers and
U.S. Tech Workers .
Much of the criticism is aimed at Indian firms which receive a huge slice of the H-1B visas each year. For example, QZ.com
reported in June about a discrimination lawsuit:
A former senior executive at Infosys [Technologies Ltd.] has accused Indian software major Infosys of a racist bias that favors Indian techies over others.
Erin Green, who worked at Infosys’s Texas office from October 2011 to July 2016, has alleged that his former employer tilted the scales too far towards Indians in its 200,000-strong workforce in the US. In a
lawsuit filed (paywall) with the district court in eastern Texas on June 19, Green cites the lack of diversity at the firm as proof of discrimination …
Since then, the lawsuit claims, “…Plaintiff (Green) was not promoted, and no white or black employees on Plaintiff’s teams were ever promoted, progressed, or given salary increases.” Only the careers of south Asians progressed. Binod Hampapur, whom Nayak reported to, is also called out in the complaint for not curbing the discrimination.
Infosys is the largest user of the H-1B program, and paid a small fine for
discrimination in 2013 :
A U.S. government cable
released via Wikileaks said that:
H-1B fraud is one of the top two visa categories for fraud throughout Mission India. All posts regularly encounter inflated or fabricated educational and employment qualifications. The vast majority of these documents come from Hyderabad. In the 18 months prior to the start-up of consular operations in Hyderabad, FPU Chennai investigated 150 companies in Hyderabad, 77 percent of which turned out to be fraudulent or highly suspect (ref F). Most of those cases slated for site visits were to verify the experience letters for H-1B applicants who did not meet minimum educational qualifications.
Some Indian business leaders admit problems. For example, Infosys’ co-founder, N.R. Narayana Murthy,
said in February 2017 that Indian managers need to learn skills from American graduates:
I think by and large, the Indian mindset is always to take the soft option. … Our managers will have to learn with non-Indian professionals … how to make sure that we understand the rules of crossing cultures. So therefore I think this is a learning opportunity for our senior people. This is not an easy option, it is s very tough option, but the earlier we start, the better it is for us.
But U.S. firms are also facing charges of anti-American discrimination. Bloomberg
reported this month that Cisco Systems is being investigated by the Department of Labor for using the H-1B visa program to enable discrimination against Americans
The DOL’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs determined that the technology firm secured visas for foreign workers instead of hiring U.S. citizens for certain jobs and paid the visa holders at a lower rate than their American counterparts, according to the sources. The federal contractor watchdog, which uncovered the alleged discrimination as part of a routine audit, is currently discussing the settlement of a violation notice issued to Cisco earlier this year …
The probe is one of several ongoing investigations into possible discrimination by federal contractors against visa holders. The OFCCP considers that a form of national origin bias, banned by an executive order first issued in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson …
American workers are also using Twitter to share evidence of Indian cheating and resume-padding. For example one video shows an Indian in a video job-interview mouthing the answers provided by a hired coach:
Many ads are posted on Indian websites offering people to coach job-seekers during job interviews.
American_desi@America_Desi
Fresh proxy interview postings. Apparently there are separate forums for providers and receivers. 100’s of such posting a day folks!
8:23 AM - Aug 13, 2018
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American_desi@America_Desi
More proxy requests!
1:37 PM - Aug 27, 2018
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Critics and news outlets have frequently reported
widespread resume fraud and legal gaming of the federal rules used to allocate work visas and green cards.
BM Laid Off 20K Older Americans, Sought to Import 37K Foreign Workers
PUNIT PARANJPE/AFP/Getty
Outsourcing corporation IBM laid off about 20,000 older Americans in the last five years, a new investigation reveals, while the tech multinational sought to import at least 37,000 foreign workers to take U.S. jobs.
A
joint investigation by
ProPublica and
Mother Jones reveals that about 60 percent of the Americans that were laid off by IBM in the last five years were workers over the age of forty. This amounts to about 20,000 40-years-old and older Americans being laid off by IBM since 2014.
At the same time, IBM has attempted to import at least 37,000 foreign workers on H-1B visas since 2016.
Every year, more than 100,000 foreign workers are brought to the U.S. on the H-1B visa and are allowed to stay for up to six years. That number has ballooned to potentially hundreds of thousands each year, as universities and non-profits are exempt from the cap. With more entering the U.S. through the visa, Americans are often replaced and forced to train their foreign replacements.
Publicly available data
reviewed by Breitbart News reveals that in 2018, alone, IBM was one of the top three multinational corporations trying to import more than 10,000 H-1B foreign workers to take American jobs.
In 2017 and 2016, combined, IBM sought to import nearly 26,000 H-1B foreign workers to take coveted, high-paying jobs in the tech industry.
As
Breitbart News has chronicled, American workers have been readily laid off from outsourcing firms like IBM, Infosys, Tata Consulting, and Capgemini, all of which are responsible for allegedly forcing their laid-off Americans employees to train their H-1B foreign replacements.
In cases highlighted by 60 Minutes , American workers laid off and replaced by H-1B foreign workers revealed that many of their offices, once entirely made up of Americans, had shifted to primarily male, Indian nationals.
VIDEO
Despite laying off thousands of American workers, and now having more employees on the
payroll in India rather than the U.S., IBM CEO Ginni Rometty’s salary has continued to climb.
For example, Rometty’s salary has climbed to now upwards of $33 million a year. In 2014, Rometty’s salary was roughly $18 million, though that was before she gave herself a raise in 2015 when she raked in close to $20 million.
As
Breitbart News most recently reported, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has tightened rules to try to prevent multinational corporations from outsourcing American jobs to H-1B foreign workers.
Since President Trump’s administration set up a hotline for Americans to report H-1B visa abuse, there have been more than
5,000 cases of alleged abuse within the visa program reported.
Tech conglomerates like Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple hide their H-1B foreign worker hires through outsourcing firms like Cognizant, Tata, and Infosys, as
Breitbart News has reported. The practice allows the corporations to claim they are not undercutting or replacing American workers at extraordinary rates, as they simply contract the foreign workers through the outsourcing firms.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder .
Congress
Floods White-Collar Labor Markets
ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images
Federal data shows that legal immigrants are filling a growing share of
several white-collar professions which have seen little salary growth since
2000.
The
data was posted by the Center for
Immigration Studies, and it shows how Congress imports foreign-born immigrants
and visa-workers to raise the labor supply by roughly 50 percent in several
white-collar science and technology jobs, ensuring much lower salaries for
Americans in those flooded job markets.
The CIS study looked at the
percentage of foreign-born workers in 474 separate occupations defined by the
Department of Commerce. The group reported:
There
are 65 occupations in which 25 percent or more of the workers are immigrants (legal and illegal ). In these
high-immigrant occupations, there are still 16.5 million natives — accounting
for one out of eight natives in the labor force…
there
are just 24 occupations out of 474 in which illegal immigrants comprise at least 15
percent of workers …
we find that only 4 percent of
illegal immigrants and 2 percent of all immigrants work on farms.
The loss of wages and status is obvious in the jobs
where migrants have doubled or nearly doubled the supply of labor. For example,
legal and illegal migrants hold a slight majority of jobs in
blue-collar agricultural sorting, construction plasterers, sewing-machine
operators, tailors, and miscellaneous agricultural
workers. Immigrants also comprise 40 percent or more of eight additional
jobs as maids, textile workers, taxi drivers, translators, roofers,
and painters.
But
the government-delivered flood of new labor has reached up to many once-prestigious high-tech
white-collar jobs that were widely seen as a hard-earned pathway to
a prosperous and secure future.
Foreign-born
workers comprise 43 percent of medical and biological scientists, 38 percent of
physical scientists, 38 percent of software developers, 36 percent of computer
engineers, 31 percent of economists, 28 percent of physicists and doctors,
27 percent of clients, 27 percent of electronics engineers and 25 percent of
software programmers, according to the CIS data .
These are huge inflows. For example,
if 33 percent of people in a career are immigrants, then the government has
raised the labor supply in that career by 50 percent.
In
February 2018, an alliance of Democrats and business-first Republicans — backed
by business groups — blocked Trump’s
Four Pillars pro-American reform in the Senate.
US President Donald Trump listens to Apple CEO Tim Cook speak
during an American Technology Council roundtable at the White House in
Washington, DC, on June 19, 2017.
The high inflow of extra workers
ensured by Congress has a large impact on wages, according to Economics 1o1
calculations. For example, the 2016 report on immigration by the National
Academy of Sciences reported that Americans lose 5.2 percent of their wages and
salaries when the government uses immigrants to raise the labor supply by 16.5
percent.
The lost 5.2 percent of income does
not go to immigrants or disappear into the air — it is transferred to employers
and investors in the form of almost $500 billion in extra profits per year.
Those transfers supercharge New York’s stock market.
One
of the academics serving on the NAS group, George Borjas of Harvard, used
his blog to translate the academies’ overly
complex description of the immigration tax:
The calculation of the immigration
surplus reported in Chapter 4 of the NAS report assumes that GDP is $17.5
trillion; that 65% of GDP goes to workers; and that 16.5% percent of the
workforce is foreign-born. The report also says that “the current stock of
immigrants lowered wages by 5.2 percent.”
Because only 65% of GDP goes to
workers, that means that the total earnings of all workers is $11.4 trillion
(or 0.65 × 17.5). But because only 16.5% of workers are foreign-born, the
fraction of total earnings that goes to native workers is $9.5 trillion (or
0.835 × 11.4). The NAS report says that native earnings fell by 5.2 percent, so
that the wage transfer from native workers to employers is $494 billion (or
0.052 × 9.5).
So the 5.2 percent transfer tax is
imposed when where government-supplied immigrants or visa-workers — such as
H-1Bs, L-1s or H-2As — provide 16.5 percent of the labor. But the immigrant
population is far higher in the high-tech careers where government-supplied
immigrants and visa-workers can jointly add 30 percent or 40 percent of the
labor.
Legal immigrants are equally
impacted by this government-arranged transfer because they work under similar
economic pressure as Americans. They gain by moving to the United States but
lose when the government moves another cohort of immigrants into their sector.
The
growing economic impact of white-collar immigration helps explain why
blue-collar wages are rising faster than white-collar wages in the current
economic expansion. Jason Furman, a former economic advisor to President Barack
Obama, used orange bars to show the white-collar slump :
Overall, salaries for technology jobs have barely kept ahead of
pre-inflation average salaries nationwide over the last decade, according to
Payscale:
But
the government data provided by CIS shows that many culture-intensive jobs
have largely escaped the diversity that many progressives promote for others.
So far, immigrants comprise just 5
percent of business fundraisers, 7 percent of lawyers, P.R specialists,
and archivists, 8 percent of writers and authors, urban planners, editors,
technical writers, law clerks, and religious directors, 9 percent of
psychologists, event planners, therapists and human-resources people, and 10
percent of advertising managers, camera operators, social workers and
paralegals.
Nonetheless, the rising inflow of immigrants
is also beginning to flood into many of these culture-related jobs.
Twelve percent of photographers,
actors, social scientists, clergy, and “news analysists, reporters and
correspondents” are immigrants. “Native-born reporters who work at English-language
media outlets face … modest levels of competition from immigrants,” CIS
reported.
Thirteen percent of chief
executives, human resources managers, and artists are immigrants.
Fourteen percent of therapists are
immigrants.
Fifteen percent of designers,
19 percent of architects, financial analysts, and computer managers are
immigrants.
Twenty percent of pharmacists and 22
percent of teachers are immigrants.
However, people who work for
government and regulated industries face little competition. The jobs with the
fewest percentage of immigrants include firefighters, soil-conservation
scientists, jailers, powerline installers, detectives, country clerks, air
traffic controllers, police officer, and teachers.
Each
year, four million young Americans enter the workforce — and the government
imports 1 million legal immigrants, replenishes the population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar guest
workers, and does little to repatriate the resident population of roughly 8
million illegal immigrants.
Overall,
the Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via immigration
shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap foreign labor .
Got
any tips about the H-1B, L-1 and OPT programs? Email Neil Munro here or
at NMunro@Breitbart.com.
AT&T Continues Layoffs of More than 16K Americans to Outsource Jobs
Findlay Kember/AFP/Getty Images
Multinational conglomerate AT&T is continuing layoffs of more than 16,000 American workers since 2011 to outsource those jobs to foreign countries while it rakes in record profits.
A
revealing report by
The Guardian ‘s Michael Sainato uncovers the extent to which multinational corporations like AT&T have profited from the GOP’s tax cuts passed last year, and yet they continue to lay off Americans to send their jobs to counties like Mexico, India, and the Phillippines.
Though AT&T executives were heralded for giving their workers $1,000 bonuses after the tax cuts were passed by the Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by President Trump, Americans keep losing their jobs to outsourcing.
Since 2011, AT&T has outsourced or eliminated more than 16,000 U.S. jobs, including the closure of 44 call centers. Just this year, AT&T has shuttered four call centers in the U.S. and sent those American jobs to foreign countries.
Americans like Cindy Liddick, who was interviewed in depth by The Guardian , have had to struggle with the prospect of having their job sent overseas. Liddick told The Guardian :
“My husband is very ill, I’m about to lose my health insurance and starting over in the job market at my age is going to be tough ,” Liddick said. [Emphasis added]
…
“It’s hitting me really hard financially ,” she said. “I could lose my house.” [Emphasis added]
At a call center in Appleton, Wisconsin, the number of American workers employed have been reduced from 500 to just 30. The Guardian spoke with an AT&T worker who was forced to take a different position at the company in Cleveland, Ohio after her local call center was shut down and the jobs were outsourced:
“My center closed in 2011. It was a shock to all of us . At the time we had an area manager telling us we had plenty of work to sustain our office,” said Laleelah Hunter, an AT&T call representative in Cleveland for 19 years. [Emphasis added]
Those Cleveland call center workers were given the option of having to relocate to Detroit, Michigan. Most were forced into unemployment.
AT&T worker Betsy LaFontaine, who spoke to The Guardian , noted that despite all the layoffs across the U.S. and American jobs being outsourced, the executives continue raking in record profits that keep growing.
LaFontaine’s call center in Appleton, Wisconsin was cut from 500 workers to now just 30 workers.
Meanwhile, AT&T is trying to merge with Time Warner, a move that would likely further cut the number of Americans employed at the multinational corporation. As
Breitbart News noted, The Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division is fighting the merger after it was approved by federal District Judge Richard Leon.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder .
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