India's Tata Consultancy Was Gaming the US Visa System
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Edit: for grammar
It would complicate some of these "games", but I'm sure they would implement a kickback system where the person would receive a great salary but it had a "side contract" where it would be required to pay most of it to another company, or just straight up fraud..
* Does compliance with the law create the behavior we want or does the law itself incentivize bad behavior?
* Can we reasonably detect a large enough percentage of fraud that the distortion to the system will be minimal?
On the second point, see patio11's The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero [0].
People better qualified than I am should analyze anything before we implement it, but at face value I'd guess that OP's proposal stands a good chance of being much better at both metrics than the current system (which is hardly fraud-free).
[0] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
The main appeal of H1B abuse is cost effectiveness. If you ruin that by forcing competitive salaries (to even get the H1B in the first place), then that ruins the whole point (and companies are going to engage less in it, i.e. only when needed/"intended").
There is also a huge difference between dealing with a consultancy agency that you suspect engages in "creative visa workarounds" and straight up comitting fraud (=> higher risk, possibly even personal, makes for a much stronger incentive).
Yeah but the official purpose of H1B is for companies like to hire highly skilled workers which they can’t find in the US.
Not to hire the cheapest indentured junior devs.
The proposal would actually help the intended H1B usecase, because it removes those "indentured junior devs" from the H1B lottery pool.
As such, if only one applicant for underwater welding is submitted the industry likely doesn’t require extra workers even if you’re willing to pay 500k/year. I’d still weight things so people paid 5x as much have 5x as likely to be picked which would discourage company’s submitting hundreds of applications for lower wage jobs.
PS: These were L-1A applications not H1B. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-1_visa
This isn’t a story about H1-Bs. Changing H1-B rules won’t do anything about L-1A abuse.
While we're often focused on technology careers here, this approach puts the new hire at Tata on uneven footing with the French teacher.
If this is true, the supply of such people should be reduced (i.e. don't hand out H1B visas to them), so that by the laws of supply and demand the salaries increase for them.
rebuttal to this is that, all the visas will get gobbled up by big tech in this scheme starving out startups, hospitals , chefs ect.
Do you know how do they game the minimum salary requirements? They pay the worker the minimum and then the worker pays back the difference over the actual salary they agreed. Depending on the jurisdiction the implementation will change.
That is simply not going to happen in the current political climate (and not under the next government either).
The whole problem from the local workers perspective is that H1B abuse depresses local wages because they now have to compete with other workers from poorer countries; eliminating bureaucracy, government provided job training or UBI does nothing to solve that problem.
You are trying to kill the reason make it exist
Recently, I have seen these orgs. do the same in europe. They are just bombarding the system with applications.
What is the motivation you ask? For billable resource, rates are different for resource when they are on-site vs off-site. Margins are better too.
The system is and has been completely broken and, like most of the immigration policy in the US, it is a façade with the sole purpose of providing cheap labor for US corporations. There are plentiful capable US engineers available to be hired without the need for any of these programs other than the most exclusive programs for the top 0.1% of talent in the world.
The same tired old argument is made in the unskilled immigration space as well. Companies scream that there’s no availability of workers to build houses, operate restaurants, tend farms, clean facilities, drive trucks, or virtually any other job.
Does anyone wonder why the current administration is targeting the immigrants themselves and not the employers that hire them? They know that by targeting the immigrants it looks like they’re doing something, when really they are doing little to stem the problem. This whole problem largely goes away if employers are targeted directly for abusing the system, but it will never happen because cheap labor for corporations is the true driver.
An anecdote, for what it's worth:
My brother graduated from Berkeley last year (CS/Math), and has absolutely struggled to find jobs. His friends have struggled; everyone he's talked to has struggled.
Meanwhile, job postings in the Indian job market (we're both Americans, but are Indian by origin so we tend to keep up with things there) are damn-near overflowing. It's a frustrating position to be in, and it doesn't look like the current administration is going to fix anything.
The wild part is there is a market between Indian wages and American wages for the H-1Bs.
Yes for engineers, no for a lot of low-level work. The role of AI is being overstated. But there is a cap to IT salaries given remote working’s impact on the relative cost of offshoring.
> Does anyone wonder why the current administration is targeting the immigrants themselves and not the employers that hire them?
Absolutely. That said, the American consumer probably isn’t ready for the cost of food where everyone in the supply chain is paid a minimum wage and full benefits. (Counterfactual: the Netherlands.)
If I hear the phrase "nobody wants to work anymore" I'm going to toss my cookies because a friend of mine just graduated with her CS undergrad, with prior management experience in an IT setting, and devops experience working through university and she is getting no interviews. Nor are many in her graduating class.
I heard from a top executive at one of the FAANGs that they are only able to fill 40-50% of their workforce from local hiring.
But, FAANG don't really hire the "visa mill" L1-A immigrants, it's usually H1-B folks that have a m.s/phd in some american university.
We all know the reality of these jobs requires very little (if any) of a masters or PhD level education.
Furthermore, FAANG is laying people off not hiring.
Also, they're hiring in some divisions, firing in many divisions.
If employees invest in training up employees (and more than just the standard HR pablum anybody who isn't a complete sociopath already know and the sociopaths spend their time trying to game all of the parts of the system) then the incentive will be to retain them else they will have to go through that training from scratch again on whomever they hire.
If you give people a place to work where they don't constantly feel like they're fighting fires, where they're not always begging for a raise, and where they're at an office designed to cater to the needs of employees rather than employers then you'd be surprised how long most workers will stay there.
What are you referring to? The post's article is about federal lawsuits filed by former TCS employees under the False Claims Act and the subsequent investigation into the practice of fraudulently abusing L-1A visas. A couple of the lawsuits were mentioned as being promptly dismissed, with one currently being appealed. The article is not portraying the state of affairs as if the issues in the system are being dealt with, but is showing that for the most part, nothing is currently being done to stop the abuse.
What the current administration is trying to do that WILL impact corporations is raise tariffs. This will raise the cost of production overseas and on-shore some business, which will increase the demand for labor domestically.
Many people argue that this will cause inflation. I don't think it will. Consumers cannot pay with more money than they have. If some country in Asia wants to sell their wares for $10 usd, and the consumer only wants to pay $9, guess what? They're only getting $9 for the goods.
Many countries are promising reciprocal tariffs, though that's what the current administration is attempting to impose. This is also great for Americans. That means corporations have to sell goods overseas for less, meaning there is less competition for their products, which means Americans can buy for less. Corporations will HAVE to accept lower margins.
It would be great if a bill could be passed to completely eliminate all white-collar immigration. We have enough talent in this country, and the other countries need it more.
Of course then they'll move more heavily to offshoring/remote, but at least then they're being honest that it was never about finding talent but suppressing wages.
Then about 10 years ago, the company dedicated almost an entire building to TCS, and TCS starting hiring contractors locally, and perhaps moved H1B's here to work on-site?
What's the next step, start hiring off-shore again?
Also, what i have seen in europe is that, there is a mandate where in they have to publish the job locally and when they cannot find the employee, they can sponsor a visa and bring them into the country. However, what they do is, they would reject all the local candidates and claim that they could not find the candidate with right technology fit.
This isn’t a story about H-1B abuse. It’s a story about TCS avoiding even the minimal restrictions of H-1B by sending applicants through L-1A.
Not a story about TCS abusing H-1Bs.
H1B shouldn't exist, there is no shortage of domestic talent for what amounts to standard office work. The sort of things I've seen done by H1B is nothing short of appallingly bad which makes this whole debate all the more infuriating.
Visas do exist for truly exceptional talent.
Wikipedia is useful on this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-1_visa
No shit. The point is figuring out how. Both to game and to be gamed.
What article states is 100% true, being involved with similar company, passed beyond my NDA agreement duration.
> ...
> Kini and two other former TCS employees who filed similar lawsuits say the company repeatedly made improper use of special manager-level visas to hire front-line workers who had no management responsibilities. All three cases, which were filed under the federal False Claims Act, were dismissed before the allegations of visa fraud were examined in court; Kini’s is on appeal. The manager visas, known as L-1As, are easier for employers to obtain and have fewer guardrails; for example, they lack even the minimal pay requirements that Congress has imposed for H-1B holders.
> Kini told Bloomberg that as Trump took office eight years ago executives at TCS, an arm of the Indian conglomerate the Tata Group, were trying to make their organizational charts match their visa applications, before any federal inspectors showed up on their doorstep.
And then further down in the graphic:
> Infosys and Cognizant, two similarly sized IT outsourcers, obtained 1,289 and 1,122 L-1As respectively between 2020 and 2023.
> During the same period, TCS obtained 6,682 L-1As, the most across all US companies. That’s over five times more than the second highest recipient of L-1A visas, Infosys.
Note the use of the L-1A visa rather than the H-1B visa.
TCS is being targeted because they're abusing another visa class other than the H-1B visa.