India Has More than 630,000 Illegals in the United States

Two Indians have been sent to jail for just three years after smuggling hundreds of Indians into the United States.

Hema Patel, 51, worked with Mexican coyotes and charged $28,000 to $60,000 to bring individuals across the Canadian and Mexican borders. When the illegals were caught, she also used her Texas bail-bonds business to spring her clients from detention, according to an ICE press release.

Patel and her business partner, Chandresh Kumar Patel, were both sent to jail for three years. Patel also had to give up her Texas house, two hotels, $7.2 million in bail bonds, $400,000 in cash and 11 gold bars, the ICE statement said.

The case spotlights the growing number of Indian workers and family members who are working illegally in the United States or are trying to smuggle themselves into the United States.

The growing numbers of illegal-immigrant Indians hope to hide among the growing number of legal Indian immigrants. For example, the illegals can take jobs in retail, service, and restaurants serving the legal Indian population.

Roughly 4 million Indians live in the United States. Roughly half are contract workers or are the spouses and children of the contract workers. At least one-sixth — or roughly 630,000 — are illegals.

A June 2019 report by the Pew Research Center said India is now the leading source of legal migrants into the United States:

More than 1 million immigrants arrive in the U.S. each year. In 2017, the top country of origin for new immigrants coming into the U.S. was India, with 126,000 people, followed by Mexico (124,000), China (121,000) and Cuba (41,000).

In 2016, the Pew Research Center reported that Indians are also the fast-growing group of illegal migrants. The population of Indian illegals spiked from 350,000 in 2009 to 500,000 in 2014. Their 130 percent growth far outpaced other countries — but it has since been supplanted since 2017 by the massive wave of migrants from Central America.

“The [illegal immigrant] population from India increased by 265,000, or 72 percent, from 2010 to 2017,” said a report by the Center for Migration Studies. The estimate puts the Indian illegal population at 630,000 people in 2017, including roughly 250,000 Indians who overstayed their tourist or work visas.

Another 40,000 Indians overstayed their visas in 2018.

In June 2019, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol said roughly 9,000 Indians were caught illegally entering the United States in 2018, up from 3,162 in 2017.

The 2018 Indian inflow was a surprise, one official told Breitbart News in 2018. “Overwhelmingly [they are] claiming asylum, based on political and religious discrimination back in India … it is not a script or any particular document [but] every story is pretty much the same,” the official said. 

Many Indian illegal migrants are allowed out of detention to get jobs before their asylum hearings, reportedly with bonds of only about $20,000.

U.S.-based labor traffickers bring in most of the illegal migrants who sneak across the border, he said. 

The Indian “facilitators in the United States are using them as indentured servants [saying] ‘Come work for me three to four years, and every paycheck I keep so much until you pay off your [debt],” the official said. 

Mexican coyotes deliver the migrants to the border after taking their passports and other identification, he said. The migrants then get caught, ask for asylum, and are released because of the enormous backup in the immigration courts. Once released, the migrants can begin working for their Indian traffickers.

The identification documents are returned to the migrants once they pay off their smuggling debts, the official said.

This current inflow of Indian illegals is so large that it has created its own backlog of almost 30,000 migrant Indians waiting for asylum hearings, according to June 2019 data federal data tracked by Syracuse University.

Indian migrants have many opportunities to plead for asylum in the United States because India is so diverse. For example, Muslim and Hindu communities have been fighting each other for decades in Kashmir and other districts, while Sikhs, Christians, and lower-caste Indians suffer discrimination in the Hindu-dominated, caste-divided, polyglot patchwork country of roughly 1.4 billion people.

In response to the Indian migration, U.S. officials have begun telling Indian asylum applicants that they must first seek safety in safe areas of their home country before they can ask for asylum in the United States.

Some Indian illegal migrants are protesting judges’ deportation decisions by going on hunger strike until they are released into the United States. “My clients feel that the detention system has not been fair, and they have met with judges who have an inherent bias against asylum cases from India,” their attorney Linda Corchado, told the India-West website.

The inflow of Indian illegals rarely makes the news because it is not yet a recognized idea in the established media — and it is overshadowed by the huge inrush of Central American migrants. Also, many newspapers hire immigrants to cover the immigration beat, so shifting the focus of media coverage towards the concerns of migrants, and away from the sordid business of labor trafficking and the politically important issue of the Americans’ priorities.

However, the media mentions are rising, partly because of trafficking deaths and the growing federal efforts to detain and deport the Indian illegals. In June 2019, for example, Reuters reported:

A six-year-old girl from India died of heat stroke in an Arizona desert after her mother left her with other migrants to go in search of water, a medical examiner and U.S. Border Patrol said on Friday.

The girl, Gurupreet Kaur, soon to celebrate her seventh birthday, was found by U.S. Border Patrol west of Lukeville, Arizona on Wednesday, when temperatures reached a high of 108 degrees Fahrenheit (42 Celsius), U.S. Border Patrol and the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner (PCOME) said.

A pro-migration Indian activist blamed the U.S. government for the little girl’s death and urged that the government welcome migrants. “U.S. border militarization, forced migration, and rejection of migrants attempting to cross at ports of entry have created an environment where a child like Gurupreet can die in the desert, alone,” Lakshmi Sridaran, interim co-executive director of South Asians Leading Together, told the IndiaWest.com news site. She continued:

Until this system is completely defunded and a new one is created that upholds the dignity of all migrants – we will continue to see unspeakable tragedies, notwithstanding the countless deaths that go undocumented. While ICE and CBP have experienced unprecedented surges in their budgets, their treatment of migrants has plunged to new lows.

In January 2019, immigration officials used a fake university to catch up to 600 Indian graduates who were violating visa rules to win U.S. college-graduate jobs.

Also, federal law enforcement officials have arrested numerous Indian-born business executives and corporations for fraudulently getting H-1B visa workers into jobs sought by American graduates. In August 2018, Breitbart News reported:

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 [federal] 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.”

Federal officials downplay the scale of Indian illegal migration and say little about the number of Indian migrants who are sent home.

The expanding flow of Indian legal and illegal migrants spotlights the vast population of poor young Indians, and also the Indian government’s economic strategy of exporting workers to other countries, including the United States.

India’s population is so huge that India has roughly 178 million young men aged 20 to 34. That number is more than one young Indian male for every two Americans in the entire U.S. population of 326 million.

In February 2019, the Forsyth County News reported from an community of Indian WalMart employees in Arkansas

Ani Agnihotri, program chair of the USA-India Business Summit … said India has a massive and young population that could provide skilled, English-speaking workers ready to relocate “even at a seven-day notice” and said the majority of doctors in the United Kingdom and about 15 percent in America are of Indian descent.

“India has the youngest population in the world. About 25 percent of the population of India, which is 1.25 billion, is below the age of 25,” he said. “We will be the provider of the workforce of the world in about 15 years, after 2035.”

Indian officials want to swap their cheap labor to U.S. investors in exchange for a larger flow of remittances, contracts, expertise, technology, and energy back into India. The two sides have gradually created a U.S-India Outsourcing Economy, which is worth roughly $78 billion to India each year.

“The movement of high-skilled individuals, personnel, Indian professionals in the U.S., through such programs as H-1B … has been a mutually beneficial partnership,” Indian ambassador Harsh Shringla told a July meeting of business lobbyists in D.C.

U.S. and Indian businesses employ roughly at least 700,000 Indian visa-workers and 200,000 student-workers in the United States. This huge workforce also brings at least 700,000 Indian-born family members into the United States. Each year, about 20,000 of these temporary workers and their family members get green cards via the “Adjustment of Status” process.

Some of these visa-workers hold jobs in elite companies, and some of those have become senior executives of U.S. companies, including CEOs of Google, Microsoft, and MasterCard, for example. Also, some of the teams which have created valuable companies in the United States also include Indians among their founders.

A large number of Indians living in the United States are contract workers hired for routine technology jobs, including jobs at WalMart and Bank of America, that would otherwise have gone to American graduates. Many Indian visa workers are stuck in lower-wage software sweatshops, where they work long hours in the hope of eventually getting green cards.

Indians display their success in business and education, for example, by highlighting the success of Indian children in American civic competitions, such as high school science competitions and spelling bees.

Some Indian visa-workers reject India’s cheap-labor business style, and embrace American values.

Many of the Indians bring their own culture and politics into the United States. This diversity includes pro-Hindu political parties, regional nepotism, as well as the 4,000-year-old ideas of caste.

The caste system creates a civic hierarchy, and it is so ingrained in Indian society, Hinduism, marriage rules, parenting, education, and careers that it is visible in Indians’ DNA, according to a 2013 press release by Harvard Medical School:

“This genetic data tells us a three-part cultural and historical story,” said [Harvard professor David] Reich, who is also an associate member of the Broad Institute. “Prior to about 4000 years ago there was no mixture. After that, widespread mixture affected almost every group in India, even the most isolated tribal groups. And finally, endogamy [marriage within caste] set in and froze everything in place.”

Caste distinctions are almost completely invisible to Americans, but Indian Hindu H-1B workers have told Breitbart News distinctions can be obvious in casual contact, names, and in business developments.

The caste system gets little criticism from American progressives because they expect to gain an overwhelming share of votes from immigrant Indians.

Many U.S professionals have told Breitbart News that Indian-born managers bring their Indian cultural practices into American workplaces.

“Indian [managers] only hire Indians because they can manipulate them, exploit them, and the young workers just take it because [any job in the United States] is better than being back in a poverty-stricken nation,” said Jay Palmer, a software expert who forced to train his Indian replacement when he was pushed out of his Florida job at Disney Corp. Indians in the United States, “will work 70 to 80 hours a week … and they won’t complain.”

In a lawsuit against Infosys, a major Indian company operating in the United States, American witnesses reported;

Hiring Manager Instructions: an Infosys hiring manager admitted “There does exist an element of discrimination. We are advised to hire Indians … because they will work off the clock without murmur and they can always be transferred across the nation without hesitation unlike [a] local workforce.”

Talent Acquisition Unit Observations: Recruiters in Talent Acquisition observed that Indians were highly favored, and it was extremely difficult to move non-South Asians ahead in the hiring process. Non-Indians were regularly rejected as being “not a good fit,” – an Infosys euphemism for “non-Indian.” This discrimination is on-going. In 2016 for example, an Infosys manager in their Talent Acquisition Unit observed that of Infosys’ 2,900 hires in the United States, 2,200 (76%) were Indian. She observed a similar hiring disparity in prior years.

Applicant Data Manipulation: Infosys manipulates applicant tracking data in such a way that consideration of non-South Asians and non-Indians is minimized, and the hiring of South Asians is maximized. For example, recruiters have observed that non-South Asian applicants were repeatedly deleted from Infosys’ applicant tracking system, forcing one recruiter to keep a separate spreadsheet of applicants on his computer. Recruiters have also observed South Asian applicants, located by Infosys’ “sourcers” in India, manually entered into the applicant tracking system despite those individuals not having formally applied, thus streamlining the hiring process. Individuals sourced in this way were moved “to the front of the line” ahead of applicants in the U.S. A recruiter also observed that applications for United States positions were regularly not reviewed, and in 2016, approximately 11,000 to 12,000 were rejected en masse.

The growing population of Indians in the United States has increased the diversity of crimes. In 2017, for example, ICE reported:

the owner of several Milwaukee-area gas stations was charged Tuesday with forced labor involving aggravated sexual abuse, harboring an alien for financial gain, and document servitude …  Harshinder Bhatia, 58, forced and threatened an Indian national woman to work causing her to believe that if she did not perform such labor and services, she would suffer serious harm.  The indictment charges that this crime involved aggravated sexual abuse and was furthered by Bhatia possessing the victim’s passport.

In 2015, ICE reported:

Naga Srinivasa Rao Pilla, 38, faces a maximum penalty of 15 years in federal prison for bribery of a public official. Pilla was also charged with procurement of citizenship or naturalization unlawfully, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years … According to the criminal complaint, Pilla, who was ordered removed by an immigration judge, offered to pay the ICE officer $2,000 to help him obtain immigration benefits.

In 2009, a United States consulate in India reported very high levels of corporate and official corruption:

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.

Tighter procedures helped block migrants who were pretending to be clerics, the consulate reported:

During the last two years, most R-1 [religious worker visa] fraud was detected amongst Tibetan refugees, Sikh raagis, and Hindu priests … R-1 fraud includes both fraudulent beneficiaries and fictitious inviting parties. Since DHS began requiring petitions for R-1 applicants in November, R-1 fraud referrals have almost completely dried up. Since DHS requires 100 percent on-site verification of petitioners, however, many potential R-1 applicants now apply for B1/B2 visas in an attempt to avoid closer scrutiny.

USCIS officials also stepped up oversight of Indians with religious visas in the United States. In 2011, for example, ICE reported:

On Nov. 10, a federal jury in the Eastern District of Wisconsin found Sagarsen Haldar, 31, aka Gopal Hari Das, guilty of conspiring to commit immigration fraud. Haldar identifies himself as the founder, president, CEO, and spiritual leader of Gaudiya Vaisnava Society (GVS), a religious temple located at 2425 W. Ramsey Ave. in Milwaukee.

According to evidence at trial, Haldar conspired to sponsor more than two dozen Indian nationals to enter the country under religious worker or “R-1” visas. Typically, the R-1 applications falsely stated that the individuals were religious workers from India who planned to be priests and perform religious work at the GVS temple in Milwaukee. In fact, the Indian nationals had no religious training or experience, and had no intention of being priests or performing religious work once they arrived in the United States.

Indians complain that their society is riddled with official and caste corruption. In April 2019, for example, the country’s former education minister revealed that she had padded her resume by claiming to have won a college degree. India.com reported:

Union Minister Smriti Irani on Thursday accepted that she doesn’t have a college degree. In her poll affidavit, Smriti Irani said that she did enrol for an undergraduate course in Delhi University but did “did not complete the three-year degree course”.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi faces the same accusations.

Immigration Numbers

Immigration is a government economic strategy which seeks to stimulate economic growth and stock prices by inflating the supply of labor and consumers.

Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university. This total includes about 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in business or health care, engineering or science, software, or statistics.

But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately 1 million H-1B workers and spouses — and about 500,000 blue-collar visa workers. The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and rarely punishes companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.

This policy of inflating the new labor supply boosts stock values for investors by ensuring that employers do not have to compete in a free market for American workers with offers of higher wages and better working conditions.

This policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations.

The cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.

The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the Heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.

The federal government does not inflate the supply of money because it fears inflation would damage the value of money.