Lawsuit Exposes B-1 Visa Fraud in College-Grad Jobs

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Neil Munro

American professional Michael Harmon has just earned about $1 million by exposing visa fraud within an Indian company that does subcontract work for Fortune 500 companies.

The company defrauded the government by importing Indian college-graduate workers on B-1 visas that are only for non-working business visitors. Harmon exposed the visa fraud and earned a share of the $9.9 million federal fine with his Qui Tam lawsuit.

The Department of Justice said:

L&T Technology Services, LTD (“LTTS”), a company based in India, with U.S. offices in Edison New Jersey, has agreed to pay $9,928,000 to resolve allegations that between 2014 and 2019, LTTS underpaid visa fees owed to the United States by acquiring inexpensive B-1 visas, rather than more expensive H-1B visas, in alleged violation of the False Claims Act.

“The B-1 visa is the main vehicle to cheat American [college graduates] out of jobs,” said Jay Palmer, an expert on forced labor and human trafficking, and a former advisor to President Donald Trump. He continued:

Companies encourage [foreign] individuals to get a B-1 visa to come to the United States and work. They work these workers on 1099s [as contractors] with no benefits and they pay them through third-party consulting companies. Sometimes, the worker will be able to get an Individual Tax Identification Number and work undetectably for 10 years.

The fraud behind this visa is more rampant than any other visa we have in the United States.

Palmer applauded Harmon the whistleblower, saying, “Being a whistleblower is not an easy task — you have to have intestinal fortitude.”

Several other B-1 qui tam lawsuits are being litigated.

Palmer is familiar with the B-1 fraud because he works with many Indians who have overstayed their visas and are looking for ways to get legal status.

The B-1 fraud is easy to accomplish and rarely detected or penalized by federal agencies, Palmer said:

All you have to do is have an outbound and a return flight to the United States –that’s all. What they do is they get an outbound flight [to the United States]… and they cancel their return, get the money and go to work.

They’re coming over here legally but becoming illegal [by working]. When they’re over here, they’re getting driver’s licenses, some are even getting Social Security numbers … they’re not supposed to, but they’re still issued.

They come to the United States and they never leave. Most people working in a convenience store are over here on B-1 visas [often working for foreign managers with E-2 visas]. Hundreds of thousands are working on white-collar jobs.

The fraud is difficult for ordinary Americans to detect — even when it is happening in the next cubicle.

The commonplace B-1 fraud is disguised amid the churning population of  1.5 million-plus foreign graduates who are working in the United States under a wide variety of legal visas.

Those temporary work visas include H-1Bs, TNs, L-1s, J-1s, and the “Optional Practical Training” work permit for foreign graduates of U.S. colleges. The legal visa workers often switch workplaces because they are employed by Indian-owned subcontractors, and often go home to avoid an obvious overstay of their temporary visas.

The B-1 fraud problem is further hidden by foreign graduates who overstay their visas to become illegal gig workers in the layers of subcontractors under Fortune 500 companies.

The huge flood of foreign college graduates is forcing down the workplace clout and the salaries of American professionals because the foreign workers will accept very low salaries to stay in the United States. In February, Bloomberg News reported:

In 2022, median annual pay was $52,000 for Americans with a bachelor’s degree, according to data released by the New York Federal Reserve Friday. That’s a 7.4% decline in inflation-adjusted terms — the steepest plunge since 2004, erasing nearly all of the pandemic-era gains. It was sharpest for those earning the most.

The government-delivered inflow of foreign workers is pushing many Americans out of white-collar technology jobs and into lower-wage, blue-collar jobs.

“I have seen the [hiring] system in the backend, and it is so appalling to see that there is so much [resume] forgery being done, there’s so much of corruption being done, that it is almost to the level back in India,” Aabha, an Indian contract worker in North Carolina, told Breitbart News. She continued:

I have met so many [American] people who are graduates and so much more knowledgeable than the Indians that I see in my regular day — and they are [saying] like “Okay, because we are not experienced, we are not getting [U.S. technology] jobs.” So they decide to do a blue collar job. They’re walking into Walmart, they’re walking into Best Buy.

And these Indians, the team that I work with, they cannot even speak a single sentence in English without making any mistakes.

Yet President Joe Biden’s officials are trying to import as many foreign workers as they can, even as Fortune 500 companies fire thousands of American professionals.

“The top 30 H-1B employers hired 34,000 new H-1B workers in 2022 and laid off at least 85,000 workers in 2022 and early 2023,” said an April 11 report by the left-wing Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

Those layoffs include many visa workers, who are required by law to return home once their job disappears.

In response, Biden’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency is allowing the laid-off H-1B visa workers to get six-month B-1 visas so they have more time to win new jobs that are also being sought by U.S. graduates.

“[We are] aware, of course, of the many recent layoffs in the technology sector, [so] we published options and useful information for [foreign] employees across the country facing termination and those in this vulnerable situation,” said USCIS director Ur Jaddou said April 11.

“Searching for employment in the United States does not fall under the meaning of a legitimate business activity for the purpose of B-1 visa eligibility,” responded Elizabeth Jacobs, a lawyer with the Center for Immigration Studies.

Very few of the illegally-working B-1 graduates are deported, mostly because of Silicon Valley’s huge influence in the White House and in both parties. This week, for example, Indian media outlets reported that four House members from California are pressuring USCIS to ensure that laid-off Indian workers are not sent home. The legislators are Reps. Zoe Lofgren, Ro Khanna, Jimmy Panetta, and Kevin Mullin.

The Democrats’ support for foreign workers over their own swing-voting, college-educated voters could be an opportunity for GOP strategists. But GOP leaders show no willingness to reject the cheap-labor demands of their own business donors.

Biden’s federal agencies also make the white-collar fraud easier by bundling B-2 tourist visas with the B-1 visitor visas, Palmer said. “They should separate these and charge more for them,” he said.

“The United States issued over 16 million of these [B-1/B-2 visas] a year and they’re nontraceable, basically — this is the same visa that some of the 9/11 terrorists came in on,” Palmer added.
Breitbart has covered some of the many cases of B-1 fraud within the Fortune 500’s pyramids of Indian-managed subcontracting companies and gig workers.

In 2013, another Indian firm paid a fine of $33 million for cheating the government as it allegedly replaced American hires with smuggled Indian college graduates.  But most of the B-1 fraud is tolerated by agencies, prosecutors, and politicians. In 2019, Breitbart News reported;

Infosys, one of the biggest Indian outsourcing companies, allegedly cheated 500 American graduates out of jobs over 11 years from 2006 to 2017 — and will only have to pay $800,000, without admitting guilt, in a settlement with California’s attorney general.

The attorney general, Xavier Becerra, now runs the Department of Health and Human Services for President Joe Biden.

However, under President Donald Trump, the reform-minded officials in the agencies began to crack down on the B-1 fraud. “They tried but it didn’t work,” Palmer said.

Extraction Migration

The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.

The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.

The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.

The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because it allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.

In many speeches, immigration chief Alejandro Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elite opinion about “the values of our country,” Mayorkas claims.

Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters. A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats

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