Indian outsourcing giant Infosys has agreed to an $800,000 settlement with the State of California, which had accused the company of evading taxes by using B-1 business-visit visas for hundreds of foreign workers instead of the hard-to-obtain and expensive H-1B.
State officials took legal action on behalf of whistleblower Jack “Jay” Palmer, a former Infosys employee, and sued Infosys in 2017. According to the just-unsealed Nov. 16 settlement agreement, state officials claimed that from 2006 to 2017, Infosys was responsible for “falsifying documents, false reporting and/or falsely identifying their employees for the purposes of procuring the wrong immigration visa for their employees that were traveling to the United States.”
Palmer, according to the 2017 lawsuit, had attended Infosys planning meetings in 2010 in which managers discussed a need to get around H-1B restrictions by using B-1 visas to cut costs and increase profits.
State Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s office said in a prepared statement that Infosys brought 500 employees to California on the wrong visas “in order to underpay them and avoid paying taxes.” The lawsuit alleged that the workers were placed at third-party firms, in many cases doing computer programming and engineering. Infosys had submitted to consular officials deceptive “invitation letters” falsely claiming foreign workers would be attending “meetings” or “discussions” when in fact the workers would be coding and programming, the suit alleged.
The settlement agreement, filed in Sacramento County Superior Court, also included state officials’ claim that the company evaded taxes because B-1 visas, unlike the H-1B, don’t require income- or payroll-tax deductions. The $800,000 settlement will be paid to the State of California.
Infosys, in settling the case, denied the claims and admitted no wrongdoing.
Silicon Valley technology giants rely heavily on the H-1B visa, either directly employing visa holders or obtaining them through outsourcers. The tech industry has long argued that the industry needs more of the visas to secure the world’s top talent. Critics point to reported abuses by outsourcing companies and claim the H-1B is used to supplant U.S. workers and drive down wages.
Each H-1B visa typically costs employers thousands of dollars in government fees and legal costs to obtain. The B-1, available in unlimited numbers for purposes including business meetings, conferences and contract negotiations, requires a $160 fee.
Infosys has settled similar claims over the years. In 2017, it agreed to pay $1 million to the State of New York, which had alleged a scheme involving false documents sent to federal authorities, and instructions to foreign citizens to deceive officials. “Infosys workers using B-1 visas were doing work that would otherwise have been performed by U.S. citizens or H-1B visa holders, and were paid significantly less than what comparable U.S. workers or H-1B visa holders would have been paid in the same positions,” the New York Attorney General’s office claimed in announcing that settlement.
Infosys denied all New York’s allegations and cited “paperwork errors.”

In 2013, Infosys agreed to a $34 million settlement with the U.S. government. Immigration and Customs Enforcement alleged that Infosys submitted false statements to consular officials and directed foreign citizens to deceive officials about the purpose of their visits to the U.S. The company also allegedly wrote and revised contracts with clients to conceal the fact that B-1 holders were doing jobs that should have been done by U.S. citizens or H-1B visa holders, authorities alleged.
Infosys denied the government’s claims. “Infosys’s use of B-1 visas was for legitimate business purposes and not in any way to circumvent the requirements of the H-1B program,” the company said at the time. “Infosys has never intended to, nor has it ever circumvented the requirements of the H-1B program.”
In 2018, Infosys, along with Apple, was accused in another whistleblower lawsuit of bringing two Indian workers into the U.S. on B-1 visas instead of H-1B visas. Whistleblower Carl Krawitt lost that case in March, then appealed, before dropping the appeal in July. Also at issue in the Krawitt case were “invitation letters” allegedly saying the Indian workers were coming to Apple for meetings. Apple and Infosys both said their

use of the B-1 visas was legal and appropriate.


Mike Lee Expands India-Giveaway Bill, Creates Work Permit Program

WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 10: Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) speaks at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on April 10, 2019 in Washington, DC. The Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee is questioning whether large tech companies are biased towards conservatives. (Photo by Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images
12:06

GOP Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) revised S.386 Indian-giveaway bill makes a huge change in immigration law to help more than 600,000 Indians.
But Mike Lee’s bill also may allow investors to flood the white-collar labor market with at least 100,000 extra foreign college-graduate workers each year.
The complex S.386 bill was changed during closed-door negotiations with Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL). The changes favor India’s huge workforce in the United States by removing the so-called “country caps,” which were designed to encourage immigration by a diversity of nationalities. This change means that the resident population of 300,000 Indian workers and their 300,000 family members get a fast-track to green cards and citizenship.
But the bill also creates a new legal status where imported workers could get a renewable work permit once their employers help to file an I-140 request for green cards. This change would effectively give Indians and other visa workers all of the workplace benefits of U.S. citizenship while they wait years for their green cards.
The work permit change is potentially good news for employers and investors because it encourages foreign graduates to flood into U.S jobs and so push down white-collar salaries. The flood would also be good for India’s government because it could help more Indians get U.S jobs and move more U.S. jobs back to India via the shared U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy.
But skeptics say that immigration law is so complex, and migrants are so determined that even slight changes can have huge unforeseen impacts. In 2008, for example, Congress unanimously passed a law, which now allows hundreds of thousands of “Unaccompanied Alien Children” to legally travel to their illegal-immigrant “parents” in the United States.
The S.386 bill has not had a hearing or a public debate, yet it dramatically changes current law in complex ways.
Roughly 300,000 Indian workers, plus roughly 300,000 family members, are working in American jobs while waiting for the green cards promised by their employers. The Indians who took jobs from American graduates are complaining about this delayed payoff, even though they knew that the long-standing country caps allow only 20,000 Indians to get employer-provided green cards each year.

Census data shows how huge numbers of American software graduates have been replaced by Indian & Chinese visa-workers in N.J., California, N.C., Georgia, N.Y., Texas, Virginia, Florida, and other states. Next: Healthcare professionals. @S386 http://bit.ly/2o0X4cp 




The H-1B law allows U.S. and Indian companies to import up to 85,000 H-1B workers each year. In addition, universities, hospitals, and other non-profit organizations can import an unlimited number of H-1B workers
There is no limit on the number of foreign workers who can be sponsored each year for the green card payoff. Many companies want to sponsor many of their H-1B workers because the sponsorship allows the foreign workers to stay in the United States after their temporary work-permits have expired.
The resident H-1B population is roughly 750,000, not counting the H4EAD work permits given to 100,000 spouses of the H-1B workers since 2015. They work in Silicon Valley, Houston, New York, Seattle, New Jersey, and many other districts that were once filled with American tech-workers.
Overall, U.S. companies have imported roughly 1.5 million visa workers via the H-1B, L-1, H4EAD, Optional Practical Training, TN, J-1, B-1, and other programs. This flood of foreign labor has helped to suppress salaries for U.S. graduates, so allowing Wall Street to spike stock values roughly $10 for every dollar saved on salaries.
Many H-1Bs are imported by U.S. managers to work as cheap labor. But many are quietly imported by Indian-born managers who prefer to hire compliant and cheap workers from their home states in India, instead of hiring assertive U.S. college graduates. This rampant nepotism and discrimination have ensured that many U.S. technology companies have a minority of U.S-born executives directing an Indian-majority workforce. Over time, some of the Indians rise into top management — and now Indians are the top managers at Google, Microsoft, and many other companies.
President Donald Trump promised to curb the H-1B program in 2016 but has done little since his election. For example, Trump’s deputies are currently trying to preserve the 2015 rule that aids investors by granting work permits to 100,000 spouses of H-1B workers. Trump’s deputies are also protecting the fraud-ridden Optional Practical Training program that annually gives work permits to 300,000 foreign graduates of U.S. colleges so they can compete for jobs against the 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees.
However, Joe Biden and other Democrat candidates are promising to dramatically expand the college-level outsourcing programs for their Wall St. donors.

Joe Biden's immigration plan promises to multiply the flow of foreign graduates into US grads' job market.
That's great news for investors.
So will US grads try to defend their class interests in lower immigration & higher salaries?
Probably not.http://bit.ly/2ElkJsP 




The updated Lee bill tries to get around numerous concerns in Congress.
GOP legislators oppose any bill that will directly increase the immigration of Democrat-voting migrants who threaten the legislators’ reelection and jobs. Lee’s bill dodges this opposition by not raising the number of green cards.
But Lee’s bill is likely to dramatically increase the future inflow of Indian graduates who take U.S. jobs to get green cards, usually via the uncapped Optional Practical Training program. In time, the OPT inflow will expand the number of Indians who will lobby for more green cards — and so deliver more Democratic-voting migrants.
Lee’s bill will also exclude many non-Indian migrants by removing the country caps which limit the current Indian inflow at roughly 20,000. The exclusion will likely create a firestorm of lobbying after 2021 once the excluded groups and businesses discover all of their annual green cards are being snatched by the investors’ Indian tech-workers. If Lee’s bill indirectly prompts Congress to expand the number of green cards by 2024, Lee will have helped to import more pro-Democrat voters who will threaten the jobs of U.S. legislators and staffers.
This backlash is already underway. For example, the opposition to Lee’s bill comes from activists and employers who fear the exclusion of Chinese scientist, Mexican dairy workers, Filipino nurses and therapists, Latin-American baseball players, as well the South American migrants sought by Florida employers.
The bill tries to defuse some of this opposition by reserving 4,400 green cards each year for the Filipino health workers who are sought by hospitals because U.S .community colleges do not have funds to train enough American nurses. In September, for example, GOP Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., won a concession from Lee to reserve a few thousand green cards for nurses and therapists.


Where is the Elian Gonzalez outrage in the Cuban community in Florida as Trump arrests and deports more Cubans than any President ever?There had been a 5746% increase in deportation proceedings for Cubans since the last administration-22,625 A 189% increase in physical removals.
Maybe we should b looking in the same place 4 Florida's Senators defense of green cards 4 skilled immigrants from Latin America. S. 386 is CLOSE 2 unanimous consent -- a dark money, zero sum bill: never had a hearing.

If Rubio & Scott fall 4 this, when WILL they stand up?

rt!




Lee’s bill is also threatened by business groups that oppose the provisions just added by Durbin.
For example, the revised bill allows the Department of Labor to investigate the near-universal fraud in the H-1B program. But advocates for U.S. professionals doubt the Durbin language will make any difference because it does not compel the agency to do anything major, and it does not allow wronged U.S. workers to sue violators.
The draft bill would also bar large companies from sponsoring green cards for their imported workers if more than 50 percent of their workers are H-1B workers. That is a big problem for the U.S.-Indian NASSCOM trade group, which makes money for U.S. investors by exporting Indians to the United States and by expanding the U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy.
“We strongly oppose the process being followed and some discriminatory provisions of the bill that deal with the unrelated matter of H-1B visas,” claimed NSSCOM’s vice president, Shivendra Singh. “The H-1B provisions have been inserted, so as to overcome the objections to hotlining the bill,” via the Senate’s Unanimous Consent rules, he told the Times of India. “Senators and companies impacted by it should be given a fair chance to fully understand and comment on its impacts,” he said.
The details are unclear, but the 50 percent rule may actually help Americans if it also reduces the incentives for U.S. and Indian companies to import Indians, said one activist
Immigration Voice, the lobbying group which claims to represent India’s visa-workers in the United States, denounced the bill for including “poison pills” drafted by Durbin. The group did not identify the supposed poison pills, but they likely include Durbin’s H-1B rules, the 50/50 section, and the I-140 provision which threatens to take more jobs from U.S. graduates.
Leon Fresco, the Democrat-affiliated lawyer who is working alongside Immigration Voice, touted the revised outsourcing legislation. “I think the changes in S.386 address every single concern raised by the bill’s opponents,” he said via Twitter. “Every new page in a bill, however, makes it more complicated to pass, which is why @immivoice is saying that if these changes result in new objections, they will be upset.”


Groups representing U.S workers slammed the Lee bill, and they spotlighted claims by Indians that the bill could quicky provide Lee’s work permits to a huge population of 400,000 t0 800,000 foreign workers.
“The “Fairness for High Skilled Immigrants Act” rewards the H-1B abuse model by redistributing all employment green cards to Indian nationals who are brought in due to cheaper wages, said a tweet from U.S. Tech Workers. “It incentivizes MORE Indian nationals to flood the visa programs in hopes of also getting GCs.”
The group said “companies have tapped into a niche labor supply that will work loyally at cheaper rates in exchange for immigration benefits, & use nepotism to exclude others (nationalities) But let congress/think tanks conflate the above with ‘high skilled.'”
The Lee bill may inadvertently create a new market for selling U.S. work permits to foreigners, said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers. Some U.S. and Indian entrepreneurs could create companies that could hire many Indians for several years of low-wage work because the Indians would be confident of getting Lee’s renewable work permits in just a few years. “That could create whole new black-market with companies, saying ‘Pay me $70,000 to [deliver renewable work permits] …  that needs to be addressed,” he said.
The Lee bill does not prevent future green card backlog, say activists. Nor does the bill do nothing to cap the number of workers who can be sponsored for renewable work permits, the activists said.
Asians who want to migrate into the United States have also objected to the original Lee bill for excluding some groups — such as Chinese and Koreans. These Asians also argue that the growing role of Indians in the nation’s software companies are promoting nepotism, reducing quality and slowing new discoveries.
The original S.386 bill has also been opposed by multiplying groups of college-graduateTwitter-using activists who have shown how Lee mobilizes India’s workforce in the United States to pressure U.S. Senators to submit to deals.
The pressure tactics include repeated claims that Durbin is racist and hates Indians, despite Durbin’s repeated advocacy for mass migration from many countries. India’s government is also lobbying for Lee’s bill, partly by offering easier access to India’s consumer market for the U.S. companies which back the S.386 bill.
Journalists in the established media have stayed silent about the controversy, despite the economic threat to their white-collar peers, families, and children.


Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC, or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com



MULTI-CULTURALISM and the creation of a one-party globalist country to serve the rich in America’s open borders.


http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/12/em-cadwaladr-impending-death-of.html


“Open border advocates, such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the CIS has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegals were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, CA, with its 2.6 million illegals, would be booming.” STEVE BALDWIN – AMERICAN SPECTATOR



Josh Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate Power,’ Tech Billionaires

JOHN BINDER

The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.

In an interview on The Realignment podcast, Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich. They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well, we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company, we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where people can start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to succeed in this country. Most people don’t want to start a tech company. [Americans] maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in a small town … they want to be able to make a living and then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis added]
The problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector, for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance between big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades, crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,” Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest earners. A study released last month revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder