NEW YORK: There has been a two-year-old row over abuses dogging the H1-B visa programme.
The issue first made headlines when two US senators wrote to nine blue-chip Indian technology firms seeking information on how they use the visa programme.
A new government report now catalogues H1-B visa transgressions aimed at smuggling cheap workers into the US, but it does not name the companies involved in the violations.
The report compiled by the US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) says that it is chiefly small firms that are the culprits. India’s technology titans who are heavy users of the H-1B visa programme do not fit the telling description of offenders profiled by the US report.
Bill Wright, a spokesman for USCIS, told US media that the agency is developing “a new risk-assessment programme” that, among other things, would vet requests from “companies with 25 or fewer employees, since that category was found to have a higher rate of violations”. The agency is tinkering with the programme based on the report’s findings. In its investigation, the agency looked at a sample of 246 employer petitions for H1-B foreign workers, out of 96,827 petitions.
“Investigators reviewed the forms and conducted site visits where they found misrepresentations and technical violations galore,” a USCIS official told DNA Money. “There were cases of downright fraud — foreign workers were doing jobs very different from those filled out in the visa forms.”
In one case, a company requested a visa for a “business development analyst,” but during the investigation USCIS discovered the H1-B visa holder would be working in a laundromat, doing “laundry and maintaining washing machines.”
The report completed in September found that 13% of the requests for H-1B visas were fraudulent and 7% contained technical violations. The report may hurt a long-standing industry demand to raise the 65,000 annual cap on visas.
Two powerful critics of the programme may now be armed with ammunition to push in the other direction.
Senators Richard Durbin and Chuck Grassley had earlier shot off letters to Indian outsourcing firms such as Infosys, Wipro, Satyam, Tata Consultancy Services, Patni Computer, Larsen & Toubro Infotech, i-Flex Solutions, MphasiS and Cognizant which had snared over 20,000 H1-B visas in 2007 asking them to explain how they use the programme. The senators voiced concerns about whether these firms were replacing US employees with cheaper Indian workers on H1-B visas.
Mike V McCabe, spokesman for Tata Consultancy Services, stressed that they paid “market wages” to all their employees and were adding jobs in America. “The USCIS is a government agency that is in charge of the visa programme so it should of course ensure that it is running effectively,” McCabe told DNA Money in New York. “We continue to hire in the US as well as wherever we are globally. We are on track to meet our global recruitment target of 30,000 to 35,000.”
Robert Hoffman, a vice-president at Oracle and co-chair of Compete America, a lobbying group told media that due to the shortage of H1-B visas US employers who play by the “rules of the H-1B visa programme are hurt when visas go to employers who don’t”.
Durbin and Grassley, meanwhile, said the USCIS report showed the government should investigate H1-B visa programme participants regularly, something it doesn’t currently do. “Until we make a conscious effort to close the loopholes, we’re going to see continued abuse where people coming to this country on H-1B visas are working at laundromats,” Grassley said in a statement.
US firms that rely on skilled foreign workers say they desperately need more of them, but opponents argue that H1-B visa holders (allowed one-year to six-year stays) displace thousands of US-born professionals and depress wages.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies had earlier blasted the H1-B visa programme, saying, “This is a cheap labor programme, a 20th-century version of importing cheap tomato pickers.”
White House contenders Barack Obama and John McCain have both voiced support for expanding the programme, with reforms.
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