Jury convicts brothers in H-1B fraud case, jail possible | Hacker News Reader

Jury convicts brothers in H-1B fraud case, jail possible

computerworld.com

67 pointsbruceb29 comments

This is not something new, It has been happening from a very long time, I am a Indian myself I know many people have formed such Consultancies in US and hire people from India filing for a position in their office, But eventually making you find job with whomever you choose and taking a part of your pay until you get Green card or some so called good ones just take your full net pay for 3 months in installments. And these type of firms also now create fake projects have desktops setup fake clients setup, hire so called "IT Professionals" from India stating he is a "Java |Ruby Specialist" creating fake documentation for the project, Fooling the immigration panel and eventually bypassing a system with wrong intentions.

On the flip side they also have gotten smarter now by hiring new grads from India who come to US to pursue "MS in tech" add some fake experience to them, train them for a month or two and leave them in the market for potential suitors, only the people who have passion to learn and thrive get to the top and are in the top currently in US markets.

Indian IT service provider companies are a different animal all together, they abuse the system by putting up multiple applications (Here you get some descent resources with no fake qualifications) but still it doesn't do justice to a startup that wants to hire one good resource from abroad because these sharks have already filled up the quota.

Ref: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/us/large-companies-game-h-...

The H-1B program is a joke. I've witnessed hundreds of people at a single firm who wholesale replaced the existing workforce.

Some were qualified but most weren't. Most had no experience and required training.

The management of that firm told people point blank that there was no future for developers, and to consider other careers. So when I hear that it's difficult to find qualified resources I consider how many have moved on or ruled out technology altogether because of experiences like that.

We've created our own problem by looking the other way when firms abused the program.

Most Indian "IT Recruitment / Consulting" firms in the U.S. are exactly this.

There's a company in Houston TX that tried to snare me into a scheme like this a decade ago. I'd love to name the company and the owner but this is not the forum to do so.

Why is it about the Indian culture that breeds these sorts of businesses? This isn't the first time I've heard of this. Why do fellow Indians take advantage of their own people for profit, instead of helping each other out?

This isn't the first time I've seen this scheme, and in the times I have it has been all Indian people taking advantage of other native Indians.

Let me ask a few follow up questions:

1. What do you think it is?

2. Do you think this is unique to the Indian culture, or do you do you think it's shared by other cultures, including your own?

3. What do you think about cultures that breed the type of businesses that take advantage of other groups of people for profit?

4. Compared to Indian wages, could an Indian business owner could easily see themselves doing his fellow Indians a favor while making a profit?

Here's my point. Look before you leap before you turn this into a cultural or racist conversation, because it's a much bigger issue than that and it deserves to be looked at from a larger perspective.

My personal opinion is we need to overhaul to H1-B system to eliminate any leverage an H1-B employer has over their employee. If we want to eliminate the exploitation of immigrants, it's critical they share our freedoms to switch jobs. If we don't grant immigrants that freedom, we're just inviting an immigrant culture where immigrants will consistently earn less which will have the effect of suppressing wages overall.

UPDATED: Formatting and grammar.

I have no idea what the answers to your questions are. I'm simply stating what I have observed in my own experiences. I've never seen anyone exploit the H1B system for such personal gain except Indian people, and more often than not they are looking to their own people for their sources of exploitation. I'm just wondering why it isn't more common. Why don't we have Chinese or other asian cultures doing this? What is the source?

People exploiting other people happens in all cultures. In this particular case it is H1B related, and it so happens that India is a good source of inexpensive English-speaking labor. This is because India is a former British colony, unlike China and other asian countries.

You might actually be right that specifically exploiting the H1B system is statistically an Indian phenomenon, but the way you ask it makes it a huge distraction when talking about the larger issue.

However, the way you asked it made it sound like you were suggesting Indians are the only ones exploiting their own people. I'd argue most cultures exploit their own in different ways.

Personally, I don't think that's an important question. I think the bigger question is: How can we fix the laws and regulations so our government doesn't inadvertently create an incentive for employers to set up IT shops consisting of cheap immigrant labor tied to sponsoring employers? Can we solve that problem while encouraging the best and the brightest people to work here, earn good salaries, pay taxes and start businesses?

I wanted to add one more point:

Our immigration system seems like it's written to benefit people who benefit from cheap immigrant labor or immigration lawyers who charge good money the help immigrants navigate an artificially complex immigration system.

Both of these groups actively lobby our government to keep the status quo. I also wouldn't be surprised if they hired public relations firms to make sure the discussion about immigration is never productive. It's not hard to to chum up up the waters with ethnic and race baiting to get both sides riled up.

It's classic divide and conquer. Let's not feed it.

They are poor, mostly speak the language and have a way above average computer literacy (apparently because IT is one of the only unregulated markets, or something.)

So, there are plenty of people looking for opportunities, even a low payed job in the us is a huge pay increase compared to India. Unlike most Chinese, the Indians actually do speak English and many have credentials in the fields that these visa are optimized for.

So given these factors, why wouldn't they do this? If you had to give up 3 months pay for a job that's 10 times your current pay, with higher prestige, wouldn't you take it? And if there was a market where such pay increases where plausible for Americans, but guarded by bureaucracy, don't you think American firms would start looking for opportunities to sell positions in that market?

Looks like the Nanda brothers had a fall out in 2012[1] and this might have come out as part of that spat.

[1]: http://600commerce.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Dibon-Solu...

This seems to be the same scheme that the other big consultancy firms you see pop up on the H1B list (Infosys, Tata, Deloitte) use, why are they not being charged?

These big firms do pay fixed annual salaries. (Not that I support what they do.)

From the linked article:

> The government said that H-1B workers were only "paid for time spent working at a third-party company and only if the third-party company actually first paid Dibon for the workers' services.

> "The conspirators falsely represented that the workers had full-time positions and were paid an annual salary, as required by regulation to secure the visas," said the government, in a statement announcing the conviction.

Do you know if Infosys, Tata or Deloitte treat their employees similarly? Or was it garden-variety-H-1B-hatred which prompted you to post this?

Of course I agree that it was bad, but up to 20 years looks way to long for this crime.

Not every killer should go to jail for life, but (let's say) some do; thus, the maximum is life. Maybe these brothers deserve 20 years, maybe they don't, but bringing people into a new country, where they will be dependent on you, in order to take advantage of them, is a serious offense. 20 years seems reasonable to me.

(Edit: changed "charge" to "offense" since that is a pattern of behavior rather than a crime.)

>Not every killer should go to jail for life, but (let's say) some do; thus, the maximum is life.

Many countries don't have life sentences.

I'm not convinced of the value of life imprisonment (or of imprisonment). I only meant to state that the maximum sentence is not related to these perpetrators, but the worst possible perpetrator of a given crime.

(Edit: forgot the "not" in "not convinced".)

You should take that number with a large grain of salt. Twenty years is more than likely the sum of the maximum sentences for each of the six charges.

Popehat has touched on this subject (how the media doesn't understand federal sentencing) from time to time.

https://popehat.com/2015/10/08/bad-reporting-on-matthew-keys...

https://popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence-el...

https://popehat.com/2013/03/26/cloudy-with-a-chance-of-shitt...

https://popehat.com/2013/08/13/the-eric-holder-memorandum-on...

One would argue that they understand it well, and default to calculating the consecutive maximum penalty or concurrent minimum allowable by law to suit the sensationalism they constantly add to every headline and article to sell because when the news is run like a business, you will get the news that sells the most, and never hear about the important things that don't attract consumers' attention. Unless it suits the need of the propaganda machine, but that's another discussion altogether.

Calling it fraud suggests that; 20 years in prison is an excessive punishment just for stealing money. But H1B is actually a large fraction of the way to slavery, and slavery is a worse crime than murder. So in this case I'd be fine with them getting the full 20 years.

You are comparing independent consultants/contractors to slaves, seriously?

Last I checked the terms of H1B, workers under it were not independent by a very long shot. Not outright slaves, granted, but the term 'indentured servitude' could reasonably be used.

I see it as voluntary servitude in the hopes of making a lot of money. AFAIK nothing stops the employee from simply walking away (i.e. going back to his home-country).

Unless you live in North Korea, nearly any unjust law can in principle be avoided by 'simply' leaving the country. In practice, this is a sufficiently costly step that we still correctly say that unjust laws infringe on people's freedom.

Mislabeling the current situation as "slavery" or "indentured servitude" won't help your cause. You can say these regulations create the incentives and opportunity to exploit immigrants by effectively making it difficult for them to shop for a better paying job.

It's better to read the numbers as "no more than" instead of "up to". "They face no more than 20 years in prison."

I think we seriously undersentence criminals who cynically and cruelly hurt people for money, but don't happen to use physical violence to do so.

(Often "undersentence" means "completely ignore." Unjustly evicting a family from their home is no less destructive than burning it down while they're out, but the former doesn't even seem to be treated as a crime.)

I personally could care less how we sentence these criminals, because I thinking changes in sentencing tend to have little effect anyway.

We should be more concerned about fixing the immigration system so our regulations don't give employers like this the leverage to exploit their employees.

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