The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is warning Americans against the perils of online love and fraud — think of Netflix’s Tinder Swindler documentary — as hundreds of thousands of illegal and semi-legal migrants are walking into Americans’ jobs.
“Romance scams are not new, but with the proliferation of online dating apps, social media and messaging apps, new types of scams are emerging that target new audiences and have drained victims of millions of dollars,” said a February 22 statement from Steve Francis, a top official at the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) branch within ICE. He continued:
These scams are a form of financial crime that can have a devastating impact on the individuals involved. A year-over-year comparison through the third quarter showed a 48 percent increase in reported romance frauds. HSI is committed to investigating and bringing to justice those who prey on innocent victims.
Meanwhile, ICE and HSI are doing little or nothing while “thousands of foreign nationals from China and India and Iran are swindling the American people” by fraudulently getting work permits via the federal Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, said John Feere, who served as chief of staff at ICE from January 2017 to January 2021. Feere told Breitbart:
It would seem to me that romance scams would be something that a federal law enforcement agency would get to after they’ve addressed the serious national security fraud on their watch. We’ve heard nothing of HSI regarding the status of [anti-fraud programs] which suggests the very serious fraud continues while HSI is focused on romance scams … The fraud is directly under their watch. It’s their [OPT] program. They’re the ones that have oversight on this.
Amid the fraud concerns, a February 17 letter from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) asked the Department of Homeland Security to explain why universities are dangling multi-year OPT work permits while they are recruiting foreign students for non-technology degrees:
New York University (NYU) maintains a lengthy list of degree programs that it asserts fall within [rules for multi-year work permits]. Incredibly, NYU’s STEM degree program list includes the following degree programs: Classical Civilization; Classics and Art History; Economics; Journalism; and Drama Therapy.
There is no public evidence that ICE’s HSI branch is trying to curb the rampant fraud within its own OPT program, said Feere.
The huge OPT program allows an uncapped number of foreign graduates of U.S. universities to get jobs in Fortune 500 companies. It was created by President George W. Bush’s deputies to deliver technology workers to Silicon Valley investors, but it also allows U.S. universities to recruit more foreign students by dangling the OPT work permits.
The OPT program “is a wildly unregulated, quickly expanding, cheap labor program,” said Feere, adding:
It was created at the request of Silicon Valley. It primarily benefits Silicon Valley, but it has such a nominal oversight that the concern at this point is not just labor and wage impacts [on Americans] — it’s also a concern of national security.
The HSI interest in online romance scams comes as Netflix touts its Tinder Swindler documentary via social media. Netflix.com reported:
The so-called Tinder Swindler is Shimon Hayut, a convicted fraudster born in Israel. Hayut used dating apps to meet multiple women, then established lines of credit and loans in their names, ultimately leaving them holding the bills.
If he was already convicted of fraud, how did he manage to get away with it again? Like a demonic Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can, Hayut appeared happy to jump from one identity to another in order to keep his scheme running. He was convicted of fraud in Finland under his birth name but carried out his Tinder con under the name Simon Leviev, claiming to be the son of wealthy diamond magnate Lev Leviev. Once his name was revealed in a VG expose, he supposedly took the name David Sharon to evade the authorities.
The documentary has sparked a national conversation about single womens’ vulnerability to scams after civic rules for dating and romance have largely been destroyed by social media, Internet porn, social cynicism, and progressive cheerleading.
'Tinder Swindler' signs with Hollywood agent, wants his own dating show https://t.co/DskyeHO4wH pic.twitter.com/rZUa4Rt2a7
— New York Post (@nypost) February 16, 2022
ICE’s ability to enforce the nation’s worker protection laws has been crippled by the pro-migration preferences of Alejandro Mayorkas, the former refugee who now runs the Department of Homeland Security. “We will not dedicate our limited enforcement resources to apprehend individuals who have been here in this country for many years who have been contributing members of our communities … it is a matter of justice and equity [to migrnats] as well,” Mayorkas said on the one-year anniversary of Biden’s inauguration.
Under Biden’s oversight, HSI officials have canceled anti-fraud projects, reduced the transparency of the huge OPT program, and also expanded its scope — despite the declining salaries and career opportunities facing U.S. graduates.
The OPT job giveaway was created by Bush’s deputies as a favor to the tech companies, with congressional approval. In 2017, the program provided one-year or two-year work permits to 383,000 foreign graduates of U.S. universities. The matching CPT program — “Curricular Practical Training” — provided work permits to another 105,000 foreign white-collar workers. That was a total of 488,000 work permits in 2017.
The work permits allow a flood of ordinary foreign graduates to get first-rung jobs in the United States. Those jobs also help the migrant workers win some of the 110,000 new visas in the fraud-ridden H-1B program. This flood of workers helps to suppress graduates’ salaries, even as housing prices rise.
Some of the OPT and CPT workers are hired for good career-track jobs by ethnic allies in Fortune 500 companies. Many work as low-wage gig workers in the pyramids of low-status subcontractors that serve the Fortune 500 companies. But all of them displace U.S. graduates who need good starter jobs to learn their professions, pay off their debts, get married, buy homes, and raise their families.
Starting in 2017, President Donald Trump’s deputies began revealing more information about the program, which was protected by top-level CEO lobbying of Trump. In 2019, the programs had grown to 535,000 foreign workers, even as U.S. graduates struggled to land good jobs in the tech sector or the Fortune 500.
In 2020, the universities and the Fortune 500 funded lawsuits to protect the program as top level White House officials fought over the job outsourcing program during the coronavirus crash. The program shrank slightly to 480,000 foreign workers as fewer foreign students arrived, and as HSI agency officials were pressured to follow the evidence of obvious fraud.
The frauds were exposed by Virginia state officials, Breitbart News, Bloomberg, and NBC. The frauds were investigated by HSI, ICE, the Department of Labor, and the FBI. The frauds generated so much bad news for the program — especially after a sting organized by HSI — that the investigations were denounced by pro-migration groups and the universities that profit from the OPT program.
But in January 2021, President Joe Biden’s deputies began to cancel anti-fraud programs, reverse prior enforcement actions, and even expand the program. Biden’s deputies are also fighting a lawsuit that argues the OPT program is illegal because it was never approved by Congress, and are hiding information on which companies are hiring OPT graduates in 2020.
The OPT, CPT, and H-1B programs are just part of the government’s extraction-migration economic strategy that imports workers for white-collar jobs. Many additional white-collar and blue-collar workers are extracted from poor countries via the J-1, E-1, E-2, TN, L-1, EB-3, DACA, UAC, family unification, refugee, and asylum programs, so helping to spike Wall St. with millions of extra consumers, workers, and home renters.
Nationwide, roughly 1.5 million foreign graduates are working in U.S. jobs as they accept lower wages workplace abuse in the hope of winning U.S. citizenship.
Some of these imported workers go home after a season or a few years. But many overstay their visas as illegal immigrants working in white-collar sweatshops, and many eventually gain an “Adjustment of Status” to become legal immigrants.
The inflow of foreign graduates is part of the Biden economic strategy that was outlined on January 21 by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in a speech to the globalist World Economic Forum. The “modern supply side approach” seeks to expand the size of the economy with additional workers, productivity gains, and tax reforms, she said:
Labor supply has been a concern in the United States even before the pandemic, in part due to an aging population and in part due to a labor force participation rate that has trended downward over the past 20 years. Now COVID and declining immigration have further reduced the workforce …
Migration moves money, and since at least 1990, the federal government has tried to extract people from poor countries so they can serve U.S. investors as cheap workers, government-aided consumers, and high-density renters in the U.S. economy.
That economic strategy has no stopping point, and it is harmful to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities and their wages while it also raises their housing costs.
Extraction migration also curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ coastal states and the Republicans’ Heartland states. The economic strategy also kills many migrants, separates families, and damages the economies of the home countries.
An economy built on extraction migration also radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture and allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
Unsurprisingly, a wide variety of media-ignored polls do show deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. The opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to one another.
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