Two Silicon Valley executives charged with H-1B visa fraud
latimes.com
latimes.com
After getting their way to YC, the founders hired two fresh H1s from India, with no internal advertisement [that's not legal]. That resulted in a significant change in negotiating power with early employees. The company went from 33% Indian into 100% Indian in 3 months.
Tried reporting this as an ethics violation to YC, no one cared. Didn't bother to report to INS, that would have caused problems to the hires and they were not the ones responsible for lies and fraud.
I always get sponsored visa job offers from Europe but never from US so I am wondering what's the difference.
Source?
I am much more sympathetic to Indian immigrants as they are subject to 150 year long green card queue, which in itself has enabled such ill treatment of these people coupled with the generic garden variety racism.
H1b must be abolished and simply hand over a green card to any employee who has been employed for more than 5 years.
Luckily, there is some natural limit. In that particular case, after transitioning from a balanced, diverse international team into a mono-culture, the company instantly stopped advancing. There've been no new hires, the product and the company stagnated and an aquihire was arranged at some point.
The program was bought and paid for by US corporations for their direct benefit.
Why would Apple, with all their money, need to hire H-1B generalist Software Engineers and Project Managers when they can out-compete literally any other company on earth? https://h1bgrader.com/h1b-sponsors/apple-inc-6g06vq412q/lca/...
The cover story these tech executives and investors use is that they like the H-1B out of a pure love for immigrants and the melting pot it creates. The reality is that they love the competitive advantage it gives them in hiring. They don't sincerely care if it's in America's best interest or in the interest of the countries being brain-drained. Some of them will admit this in private.
(Disclaimer: I have nothing but respect, understanding, and zero judgement for employees working in the US on H-1B visas. I have a dozen good friends on H-1Bs. They're in no way to blame for these abuses. They're just doing what's in the best interest of themselves and their families.)
There may be some firms who are abusing the system. The example of Disney comes to mind... they hired H-1B workers, then laid off US citizen employees, then had the laid off employees train their cheaper replacements.
But just because some people are abusing the system doesn't mean the system is inherently bad. The reason the US is a technology superpower is not merely because of the programmers who were born in the US, but also because of the programmers who immigrated to the US.
Adjusted for inflation, wages for top talent has gone up about 20% in the last 30 years. In 1990, if you got a job in a top company such as Sun Microsystems you got paid about $45K (average then was $40K). If you adjust for inflation that would be around $98K. But today's fresh graduates make about $115 to $120K if you get into a company like Microsoft, and Microsoft isn't even one of the top employers in terms of pay. Facebook and Google pay much more.
How many American workers would have to be abused by this law before it becomes "inherently bad"? (as a number between 0 and 300 million)
>The reason the US is a technology superpower is not merely because of the programmers who were born in the US, but also because of the programmers who immigrated to the US.
The reason they moved to the US was to work with the programmers who were born here, so yes it literally because of our accomplishments that people strongly desire to immigrate here, and that doesn't diminish their contributions.
>wages for top talent has gone up about 20% in the last 30 years
Assuming that is true, we have been screwed out of a lot more than I realized. The United States has spent the past 30 years enjoying the greatest era of peace and prosperity the human race has ever seen and the most talented American engineers who made that possible only got a 20% raise in that time. That's shameful.
Not necessarily. The US is a gathering place for top talent, and that's not necessarily because of the talent that was born here.
> American engineers who made that possible only got a 20% raise in that time
No. The starting pay has gone up 20%, adjusted for inflation. That's not the same as raises over the lifetime of a single engineer.
Having seen it up close, the even greater issue for society is this program & how it’s used has created an engineering culture of order takers.
That’s the least valuable configuration of engineering teams.
People moved to the US to work with the capitalists. There is plenty of talent around the world, while capital is far more scarce. The key US advantage is that it first won WW2 without suffering massive destruction, and then it used its economic advantage to win the Cold War. American share of private wealth has long been far more impressive than its share of technological talent.
Honestly?
Someone at a FAANG I won’t name explained it to me: They don’t check for employment eligibility/citizenship status before interviewing. If they like the person, legal is given the task of getting them a work visa. If they can’t, they’ll park the foreign worker at a satellite office until they can secure one. H1s and O1 are rather cheap in terms of legal fees. Especially when you operate at scale.
And instead of getting in legal trouble for fraud like this company, they're protected by their size, legal teams, lobbyists, and money. It's only H-1B fraud if you're doing it at a relatively small scale.
Believe it or not, that's actually a good thing. It means they're looking only at skills and qualifications, not passports or "driving down wages with foreign labor", when making hiring decisions.
Also it's not completely true. Recruiters will make a note of your employment eligibility for planning purposes (a new hire needing a visa transfer will take longer to start, the company has to allocate budget to legal etc). In large companies the people making the hiring decision most likely have no idea, and definitely do not care, about the candidate's work permit status. It's a thing for HR to take care of as a part of closing the deal.
As far as I remember, the vast majority, if not all, of recruiters I spoke with in the past few years asked me about my work eligibility in the US.
Because they can't put the real job title on the application where that site got data from. It has to be within these generic ones by regulation:
There are hundreds of thousands of US workers that can fill these generalist roles. It's not as if Apple is trying to hire US workers, failing, and then resorting to the H-1B program as they're supposed to. They use the H-1B to increase their labor pool and lower costs. That's the scam.
They don't have to try and fail to hire US workers in order to use the H-1B program. That's for employment-based green cards. The H-1B only requires specialized skills - software engineering is a specialized skill.
> They use the H-1B to increase their labor pool and lower costs
Go check out levels.fyi to see what Apple pays "generalist software engineers". It's well-known that the younger generation of American workers is financially struggling. So it's not like they're turning down software roles at Apple because it's not enough money.
The US Department of Labor disagrees with your assertion:
"The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States."
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b
There are requirements for companies to attempt to hire US workers first. None of them actually make a good faith effort to do this, they just pretend to. And that's why it's fraud.
You should read your own link again. It doesn't say that anywhere. Here's what it does say:
"Employers must attest to the Department of Labor that they will pay wages to the H-1B nonimmigrant workers that are at least equal to the actual wage paid by the employer to other workers with similar experience and qualifications for the job in question, or the prevailing wage for the occupation in the area of intended employment – whichever is greater."
Heck, another source from the US Department of Labor explicitly answers this question[1]:
"The H-1B employer is not required to recruit U.S. workers, unless it is H-1B-dependent, a previous willful violator of H-1B requirements, or an employer receiving funding described in the Employ American Workers Act (EAWA) which hires a new H-1B worker during the period Feb. 17, 2009 through Feb. 16, 2011. Such employers must take good faith steps to recruit U.S. workers for any job for which they seek H-1B workers."
1. https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WHD/legacy/files/whdf...
Today, it seems that only "willful violators" are legally required to recruit U.S. workers. So FAANG are merely violating the intent of the law, which is stated extremely clearly by the BOL:
"The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce"
There's nothing debatable or ambiguous about this direct statement of intent.
So these corporations have successfully bribed the right people to make it legal to violate the intent of the law. Which shouldn't surprise anyone but changes nothing about the ethics of the situation. It's still a massive abuse and entirely used for the purpose of increasing corporate profits.
Source?
> So FAANG are merely violating the intent of the law
If someone can't hire enough domestic workers when offering $300k/year, I think it's safe to say there aren't enough domestic workers. At that salary level there are unlikely to be loads of people uninterested in the job. It's not hard, dangerous manual labor.
I don't have the interest in doing the legal research. I could be just wrong about the requirement. Or it could be that in practice HR lawyers advise companies to make a token effort of recruiting U.S. workers as a precaution. It doesn't change my fundamental point in any way. Either way, the loophole is absolutely massive and exploited at great scale.
The intent of the law is extremely clear and it is being violated. Just read the statement of intent and then work for any U.S. tech company in a hiring role, and you'll soon know for yourself.
> If someone can't hire enough domestic workers when offering $300k/year, I think it's safe to say there aren't enough domestic workers.
Or is it more likely that they'd have to increase the offering to an even higher number? In other words, it's a de facto subsidy for tech companies, to prevent them from having to increase wages. Text book wage suppression.
It just doesn't make any logical sense why FAANG would have to use H-1Bs at all, except for a few roles where their may truly be a lack of candidates. How do the other thousands of U.S. tech startups have any U.S. workers at all then, if FAANG is in good faith trying to recruit U.S. workers?
I think I've explained the situation clearly, and don't believe any reasonable judge could disagree with the main point that the program is not being used as intended.
I'm done with this thread now. Have a nice day.
Yeah it does. The letter of the law isn't being violated at all. The spirit isn't being violated either at FAANG companies. The wages are in the top 5% nationally - they should have no difficulty attracting domestic workers, if they existed. The visa burden is so onerous. Why would any company go through that willingly?
> How do the other thousands of U.S. tech startups have any U.S. workers at all
Usually by underpaying workers by promising equity that will be worth way more later, recruiting through a sense of mission, giving out higher titles, or simply hiring lower-caliber talent or less-experienced people who don't know their worth. I've experienced all of the above.
> Or is it more likely that they'd have to increase the offering to an even higher number?
How does that increase supply? Where are the large numbers of people who are otherwise interested in and capable of doing software engineering but $300k just isn't enough money?
> don't believe any reasonable judge could disagree with the main point that the program is not being used as intended.
I don't know what a "reasonable" judge is - I assume it's whoever agrees with you - so that's meaningless. However, no judge so far has agreed with your opinion, as far as it relates to the FAANG companies.
Countries where the government is happier to see smart, educated people go to secure its own leechy position? Where there is little industry in the first place, what there is is owned by a few oligarchs, and mostly focused on “national security” projects like blocking Google Maps and cloning it.
Competition is the only thing that can stop exploitation. These countries don’t lack for “brains,” they just have too many parasites.
I’m self taught and got my first “in” when a local employer wanted to hire lots of H1B visa folks.
I was less qualified, but hired because they needed to prove they were willing to hire non-H1B visa folks in order to hire H1B visa folks.
More broadly, I suspect the program I worked at wouldn’t exist without H1B labor. At least not in the US - they might have run it overseas.
I’ve been offered insane sums of money at places that mostly hire H1B visa workers - far more than made sense.
They wanted to hire me as evidence they were hiring people like me. And they paid me accordingly.
The H1B people I worked with have became friends and mentors. OK, the ones who weren’t faking it.
Didn't know that was actually illegal. It's good they're cracking down on this. These firms crowd out legitimate companies trying to hire someone.
I have friends who worked in the middle east and others who are working in France (in farms), and the living conditions are similar, probably worse in France, why when the West does it it is okay?
At the very least it doesn't get to 50C out there, so there's that.
In France it is similar, except that you just get deported if you leave to work elsewhere, also you are forced to work only 6 months then get back, that's why a lot of such workers feel inclined to marry older French women, so they get some job security. It doesn't get so hot in France, but it does get so cold.
To be fair to France they get paid a livable wage, like livable in the host country, but in the flip side such workers pay +10k to get such contracts. Also to be fair to the French, North Africans are complacent in such a business, and often than not the company that act like a middle man and hire the workers to the French farmers are often owned by North Africans.
You gonna argue not all foreign workers, which apply to the Gulf too.
Same goes for Thai berry pickers in Sweden, they go through shit, but it didn't happen to catch in the news and redditors did not type the same comment about workers every time they saw a Sweden news story so no one cares.
That's not true. If H1-Bs were not a good deal for the guest workers, there wouldn't be a 10 year waiting list to get one. Living standards are so much higher in the United States due to massive infrastructure investments than in the countries most of these guest workers come from that accepting a lower wage than an American would otherwise earn is still a once in a lifetime opportunity for them. The workers being exploited by wage depression here are the American ones, and that's not even addressing the infrastructure costs of a growing population which is distributed evenly instead of being born solely by those incurring the cost.
> Companies also have to do prevailing wage checks, which often results in pay increases.
How? In my experience H1Bs always make less because they are taking a hit in pay in order to benefit from the public services they wouldn't get in their home country.
That said, I don't know any of the subtle points of the visa system.
How about this: If below minimum wage illegal work wasn't a good deal for guest workers, there wouldn't be illegal immigration to the US.
This doesn't mean its not exploitation, although not every H1B is being exploited.
> The workers being exploited by wage depression here are the American ones
85K new H1B's a year aren't enough to depress wages when the population of the US is 300M+. Especially when there is record demand across industries. Look at tech, every company wants to hire more and is competing with high salaries.
> and that's not even addressing the infrastructure costs of a growing population which is distributed evenly instead of being born solely by those incurring the cost.
I don't understand this point. Isn't every citizen benefiting from the improved, expanded infrastructure? Legal immigrants like H1Bs pay the same taxes as any citizen or a permanent resident.
Moreover, primary H-1B holders are basically by definition selected to be the subset of the population that poses a negative burden on society. They have a steady job (if they lose it they get deported); they have health and criminal background checks; they are college-educated. Some other country took the burden of educating them and took on the risk that they’d turn out to be a deadbeat, and the US receives them as a taxpaying adult.
(Full disclosure, I was an H-1B holder.)
I thought losing your job created a weird legal grey area, where you were allowed to stay in the country and look for work, but couldn’t reenter if you left.
I was at a large company in Silicon Valley where over 50% of employees were Indian. A large, white American, company.
I’ve seen this shit with my own eyes. I don’t know man, is SQL Migrations and web development so hard to find in fucking Silicon Valley? Lol.
This stuffs a scam.
There’s no way your state labor department or insurance company is going to pay a premium for US workers to train for and work a dead end, low satisfaction job updating 50 year old COBOL or 20 year old J2EE. So they contract out the work on-prem or setup a technology center in Nowhereville, New Mexico to grease the skids and make the hiring process work.
The reality is, without the H1 folks, those jobs would just be outsourced abroad anyway. The calculus is easy: the company benefits from greater control, the country collects taxes from people who may not ever collect benefits, and we get a pipeline of skilled immigrants.
We really don’t need to contract out at all. I’m sorry my Indian friends, but Jonathan at the local community college has been learning AWS too. But don’t fret, you guys have a billion people in your country and they need tech too - stay there, and improve it.
It’s tough to do for a smaller company, you can pay one skilled worker a wage 3x the semi-skilled worker and get 5x-10x the output.
Good luck finding that COBOL programmer.
It’s fine work, but it’s not specialist work, and it has prevented me from hiring American many times.
Well, this is obviously false.
Compare these numbers from 2017 ( https://elaineou.com/2017/08/26/the-mystery-of-the-vanishing... )
> According to this Joint Venture Silicon Valley report, 74% of Silicon Valley tech workers are foreign-born immigrants. A decade ago, 36% of Silicon Valley tech workers were born abroad. In 2000, only 29% were.
> Tech industry employment has increased from about 300,000 jobs in 2007 to 400,000 in 2016, so even though we created 100,000 engineering positions in the last decade, we’ve also displaced 88,000 domestic engineers.
"74% of the employment pool just isn't enough people to make a dent in salaries" is not an argument that can pass the laugh test.
That "74%" you tout is useless as a number, unless you know exactly how many of them are on H1B and how many out of that subset are "depressing wages" (in which case, you should've used the number for that instead of the one for "foreign-born" employees).
I worked with quite a few H1B people before, and they were being paid pretty much the same as the rest of the teammates who were US citizens. And no, I dont think that all of us were underpaid at all. Unless you count close to $200k/yr for junior devs as being underpaid, in which case, I still am more than happy about being "underpaid" like that in the past at the start of my career.
Not discounting that abuse of H1B happens (just look at the likes of Tata and Infosys), but trying to claim that all H1Bs are like that or, even more ridiculous of a statement, that all of foreign-born employees are H1B holders is just disingenuous.
How did you get that way?
So attributing your presence as foreign born immigrants to the H1B program would be... correct?
I don't see how this is relevant to the discussion at hand at all. Given I am a US citizen not bound by visas or anything like that, how am I even theoretically able to "suppress wages"?
Your point about this just seems like the most pedantic "technically correct" statement that has zero relevancy. I disputed the fact that the 74% foreign-born number has anything to do with suppressing wages, as a lot of them are US citizens and can choose to work wherever they want (note: they dont even need to be US citizens for that, as green card allows that, along with a bunch of other visas). And your retort is that some of them used to be non-US citizens at some point? That doesn't address the point that the 74% number is useless in the context of this discussion.
> I don't see how this is relevant to the discussion at hand at all. Given I am a US citizen not bound by visas or anything like that, how am I even theoretically able to "suppress wages"?
You're suppressing wages by working in the industry. "Suppressing wages" and "being present" are the same thing.
And, as you note, you're present as part of the H1B program.
> Your point about this just seems like the most pedantic "technically correct" statement that has zero relevancy. I disputed the fact that the 74% foreign-born number has anything to do with suppressing wages, as a lot of them are US citizens and can choose to work wherever they want
This is your problem; you don't understand what suppressing wages involves.
Please tell me what it involves then, because throughout my entire career, all I've been seeing is heavily increasing salaries for software devs all across the board, from juniors to seniors. 5-10 years ago, $200k/yr starting salary out of college was either extremely rare or almost unheard of. These days, it is pretty commonplace at bigger tech companies or unicorns.
Also, I don't see how one can suppress wages at the same time as the entire industry is struggling with hiring competent people. At the previous company I worked at, we had to interview about 50 people to fill 1 position on my team. It wasn't limited, if all 50 qualified, we would have hired them all, just spread them out to other parts of the company. They weren't competing for one single spot against each other. And yet, it took us around 50 people just to find a single qualified person. And that's not counting those who got filtered out at the resume stage.
Cannot comment on other industries, but in tech, imo H1B tends to fulfill its intended purpose by addressing the shortage of qualified candidates (exceptions apply where fraud and abuse is involved, like in the OP or certain consultancy places like Infosys).
Are you confusing H1-B with the Green Card queue? I'm not aware of any queue for H1-B - just the annual lottery.
This takes care of wage suppression as people can leave after a year. This takes care of body shops clogging the pipelines as they have to spend their own money to finish the checks. This takes care of the limited number of visas as the pipeline empties every 12 months without fail.
This solves almost all the H1-B idiocy. This is, of course, why no one in the valley ever proposes this solution.
The simple solution is “just abolish the H-1B”.
If you want more employment-based immigrant visas, just increase the number of visas issued in the employment-based categories, and eliminate the domestic-wage-suppressing-guest-worker-visa-with-bureaucratic-overhead-to-pretend-its-not-for-suppressing-domestic-wages.
Yes, you can. Someone might want to make the case that preserving H-1B for just academics in the case of general elimination is a good idea, but it's not the simple solution.
> It is also a good way for people with unique skills (usually not in software) to wait for their green card availability.
If you increase the number of, and properly allocate, visas in employment-based immigrant categories, you don't need a dual-intent non-immigrant visa category for people to “wait out” in. (You could further fix the waiting-out problem by eliminating per-country limits, and applying only the global limits in visa categories; it's the per-country limits that create the really absurd wait times.)
Simple: if you want to accommodate more employment-based immigrants, increase employment-based immigrant visas rather than keeping an employment-based, mobility-limiting non-immigrant visa category around, but make it a possible immigration funnel because it allows dual intent.
I don't think any company will wait that long for a single hire.
However, the time delay should be short. 12 months would be pretty close to ideal--24 months at worst. And the company should bear ALL the costs and deadlines of the required background checks and clearances. If they have to hire special investigators to get it all done--so be it--they wanted the candidate, after all.
And, if the proper investigations don't get done, the company CEO goes to jail with a felony. None of this "token business fine" garbage.
Many years ago we had to relocate engineers from Switzerland, France and Canada in the US after an acquisition. Most of them on H1s or O1s and it sure wasn't cheaper than US devs here in the valley.
> only works as long that labor can't walk across the street for a raise.
They absolutely can. It's a trivial filing for an immigration attorney.
Applicant: You absolutely can!
Employer: Great!
Applicant: It's a trivial filing.
Employer: Ugh, okay.
Applicant: For an immigration attorney.
Employer: click
Because they aren't doing anything illegal. Those companies hire for a real role, and pay an H1-B worker the same as a citizen.
All the big tech companies are:
* Employing the people to do actual work for the host company. E.g. A Google H-1B is doing work on google products, for google.
* Paying competitive salaries - you're not going to find anyone saying the FAANGs aren't paying top dollar
This "small time staffing firm" was paying below fair wage, and providing fraudulent documentation about the work they were doing.
If you're super concerned about the "H1-B visa pipeline" you shouldn't be looking at big tech. You should be looking at the "consulting" firms like Deloitte