Since the H1 B visa scam / fake degree story is in the news I have to weigh in as I have been commenting on this for many many moons.
Full disclosure- I am an American of Indian origin and came to the US in 1991 to go a top graduate school for a double masters in engineering and then used the H1 B visa to work and then got a green card and became a citizen in 2000. Back then the scrutiny for a H1 B visa was much stronger and the misuse was minimal.
That said my allegiance is to USA alone and zero to India - I broke of all allegiance. Visas / immigration should be for the benefit of Americans only and I don’t care what happens to any Indian.
Like with any political issue there is nuance. Not every Indian degree is fake. There are the top tier of Indian universities which are among the most competitive on earth. The admission rate is between .01 to 1% which means 1/1000 to 1/100 who apply get in.
Here are some names
Indian Institute of Technology - many campuses
Delhi college of engineering
Indian institute of science
University of Delhi
This is not a comprehensive list. The top graduates from here then take the TOEFL and GRE and get into top graduate schools in America for masters / PhD programs and then apply for a H1 B and enter the American workforce. That was the path I and many of my friends took. You can’t buy these degrees and the kinds of high profile jobs we have if we didn’t know what we were doing it would become self evident and the market would not pay very high incomes for no work.
Now since Y2 K and then as more and more work was in IT / remote work the Indian scam culture took over. Indian body shops set up shop in the US and started hiring people from lower level universities which do not have the same standards and these are the fake degrees being sold in India. There are elaborate scams to get these people hired on fraud resumes and often the real work is done by people in India and the H1 B visa employee in the US is a front for a total scam. This is now spreading to non tech fields like medicine as well. Especially in southern India universities came been created in the last few years just to sell fake degrees and cash in on this scam.
Sadly this has become the majority of the H1 B visa and 100% needs to be dismantled and overhauled.
The nuance I want to remind people of is this - if the Indian in question went to a top school in India and a top grad school in the US that is NOT a person that came on fraudulent credentials. You can’t buy a fake masters degree from MIT or Stanford or UT Austin for example.
The scam is people who don’t go to school in America and went to a lower tier / dubious school in India and work in an Indian dominated field or company / remote work.
This species who is here based on fraud needs to be deported and banned from ever working in America ever.
And the H1 B is the tip of the iceberg. The inter company visa L1 is massively misused and doesn’t get the same level of scrutiny and has no caps.
ANY non visitor visa should be issued based on the interest of the USA alone. Any applicant who uses fraud in their application should be banned for life from every studying / working in the USA.
The even bigger problem is the lack of assimilation by people of Indian origin which is my real pet peeve.
H-1B FRAUD RING BUSTED IN CALIFORNIA
Sampath Rajidi and Sreedhar Mada, both 51, of Dublin, CA, just pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit visa fraud.
Rajidi ran two IT staffing firms (S-Team Software, Uptrend Technologies). Mada was the Chief Information Officer at UC Agriculture & Natural Resources in Davis.
Here’s the scheme:
They filed H-1B petitions claiming foreign workers would staff “University of California” projects. Mada used his UC title to make it look legit.
The jobs didn’t exist.
Once the visas were approved, they quietly marketed those workers to OTHER employers, having already secured the H-1B slots on false pretenses.
Both face up to 5 years + $250K fines. Sentencing is July 30.
The program isn’t broken by accident. It gets gamed on purpose.
A Chinese tracking device was discovered in 🇬🇧 Prime Minister's official car. The bug is believed to have been found in a sealed part of the vehicle imported from China.
Its discovery during a sweep first emerged in 2023, sparking fears that Beijing was aggressively spying on ministers in the then-Conservative government.
Now it has been revealed that the device was in fact found in the Prime Minister's car the previous year.
Charles Parton, of think-tank the Council on Geostrategy, told the Commons Business and Trade Committee: “The prime minister's car in 2022 was emanating data to China through the cellular module.”
This device is thought to have allowed it to communicate to others over mobile networks.
It is not clear which of the three Tory prime ministers that year — Boris Johnson, Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak — was being targeted.
Questioned by MPs about this, Parton — who served as a diplomat for almost 40 years, including more than 20 in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan – added: “A very senior member of the government who certainly knows whose car it was told me.”
The part of the car containing the geolocating device had been installed by the vehicle's manufacturer, reports at the time said.
Parton's claim came during a discussion about cellular modules, which he warned are 'in everything' including planes, cars and even smart doorbells.
“The Chinese aim to get a monopoly in the manufacture of cellular modules, and they're doing pretty well at that already,” he told MPs.
“If the Chinese wish to shut off all your vehicles, because they've all got cellular modules, it wouldn't be difficult.”
Security officials have since dismantled government vehicles used by ministers and diplomats while looking for tracking devices.
Electronic vehicle parts are said to be embedded with SIM cards before being sent to manufacturers as sealed units, with these capable of sending data back to state-owned suppliers in China.
It is understood the Prime Minister's car is run by the Metropolitan Police.
https://t.co/zqsk3m8RXd