Prison for visa fraud in case involving Bay Area workers | Hacker News Reader

Prison for visa fraud in case involving Bay Area workers

mercurynews.com

57 pointshanging28 comments

The government should be able to seek denaturalization of people who misuse the immigration system to oppress other immigrants (for example by ordering them to break laws, making them pay visa fees, etc).

This guy Katam was an immigrant himself, and became a US Citizen in 2009. If I was emperor, I would want him denaturalized. A year or so in prison is not enough punishment.

There's a reason why denaturalization usually only happens if you perjured your way into citizenship: it's an extremely severe action that is not meant to be a punishment, but rather to correct a mistake (according citizenship to somebody who in reality failed to meet certain criteria).

Denaturalization as punishment is something you see in totalitarian ethno-states, not democracies.

No in France you can loose your acquired nationality if you participated to terrorism against France. Was voted in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, though wasn't of much use since all the terrorists of those attacks were natives of either France or Belgium.

I wonder what happens if someone like Le Pen ever gets in charge. Being able to de-naturalize "terrorists" sounds like a pretty serious power that could be abused.

What about the UK and Shamima Begum losing UK citizenship?

Mistakenly nationalized someone without the character UK citizenship demands. (EDIT: /s)

She was born in the UK.

..and Australia, if you have been sentenced for a serious crime (more than 3yrs, iirc). (0)

Hell, we don't even particularly care if we make them stateless. (1)

(0) https://www.sbs.com.au/news/new-laws-will-strip-australian-e...

(1) https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-08/neil-prakash-defin...

Germany allows it to, but only in case of dual citizenship and people returning from ISIS-supportive groups in foreign countries.

If he's a citizen, that probably violates the Equal Protection clause.

That does happen for lying on the immigration and naturalization forms. We have have deported and denaturalized Nazi concentration camp guards before.

Doesn't India disallow dual citizenship? Wikipedia [1] claims that Article 9 of the Indian Constitution forbids it (note that the Overseas Citizenship of India designation is not actually citizenship). So denaturalization would legally leave the person stateless. Making a person stateless against their will is considered a serious violation of human rights, regardless of what they have done.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_nationality_law

Fair point, although there is no way that "year and a day" is enough punishment for this.

There are thousand others operating with impunity. https://techjobs.sulekha.com/h1b-jobs-usa - One of the popular marketplace for these “consulting” companies.

Hi, am looking for the H1B visa consultant for filing process currently. When you talk about the impunity stuff here can you please tell me 1 consulting company on this issue.?

i have used some of the services, let me know the business name so i will be aware of it

His clients must be angry as hell. $3000 USD is a year's salary for many people in India, and was paid to a fellow Indian who took it to pad his pockets. This asshole was also an immigrant and knew what he was asking for from clients could be a life savings with help from friends and family.

All while bullshitting the government to only benefit himself. The sentence is quite deserving considering what a terrible person he was to many people.

Isn't that peanuts in the Bay Area?

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It's a tool to ingest raw h1b data into postgres, so you can study the data easier with SQL. It contains all rejected and approved cases from 2014 to 2018.

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> The head of an IT staffing company has been sentenced to a year and a day in prison

This is a strange sentencing length; was there multiple charges of which one had a penalty of a day in prison?

That extra day makes a huge difference.

In what way?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_and_a_day_rule#As_a_sente...

It’s a common thing, since sentences that are a year or less aren’t entitled to certain credits in some places (“good time” credit in the US federal system). Since this is a federal case, that is probably the reason.

Defense counsel will sometimes even ask for the extra day, since this credit will reduce the actual time served.

http://federaldefendersny.org/information-for-client-and-fam...

I think a year is usually a cutoff for sentencing rules.

For instance, in many places if you serve less than a year you are places in jail, rather than prison. (It is distinctly better to be in prison rather than jail in most cases.) I know in my State there are a lot of other rules that are different if your sentence is over a year or not, but I don't know what rules would be applicable in this case.

> On his own, the man received a job offer from Samsung in San Jose, according to the complaint.

How is this possible? Wouldn't the invalid arrangement have been flagged by e-Verify?

Does e-verify occur BEFORE the first day of employment?

I think it happens on the first day when you fill out the I-9 form and provide proof for identification and employment.

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