H-1B Visa Fraud

There was a good post on the technology web log, Slashdot, about a government report released earlier this month that details that 20.7% of H-1B visa petitions to the United States were submitted with fraudulent information or technical violations, thereby supporting a policy for increased auditing procedures for H-1B visa applications.

There was a more interesting aspect to this of which I was not aware. Apparently, many companies on a week-by-week basis supply job advertisements in various publications (magazines, newspapers, online job postings) in which the company has no desire to actually accept local U.S. workers for consideration of the job itself. Some companies attempt to make their job postings contain job requirements that most, if not all local workers, could fulfill. For example, a software development consulting firm could post a job posting that required a senior software developer with 20+ years of programming language experience in a language that hasn't even existed for that amount of time.

Why do companies do this?

1 - By showing that a job posting was made and was unable to be filled by local U.S. candidates, it becomes easier to obtain H-1B visas to hire an non-citizen applicant. The applicant can be hired for a cheaper rate, thereby saving the company money.

2 - By showing that a job posting was made and was unable to be filled by local U.S. candidates, it becomes easier to obtain H-1B visas to hire a pre-selected non-citizen applicant. If a company has an international applicant in mind even before the job posting is made, the company can make a bogus job posting in order to make a stronger case for the pre-chosen international applicant to obtain work status or permanent residency. The only simple way for many international workers to get residence in the United States is to marry a United States citizen. By making a bogus job posting, this creates a loophole to ease the residency application process.

This entire process is shameful, for the companies that skirt the process for minor gains and, more importantly, for the counterproductive process created by the U.S. immigration office. It's not just local workers who are taking it from behind here. Unscrupulous companies can lure international workers with the idea of naturalization only to see it not take shape when the worker demands more compensation, benefits, or more firm ground to stand on for permanent residency. If the worker is fired for someone more agreeable, then they simply get deported back with little rights of their own.

Despite the tangential problem of declining interest by U.S. students in the study of math and science, and thereby a reduction in the amount of talent present in the U.S., there is an advantage to brain draining top talent from other countries to the United States.

The problem to me is when a company hires a H-1B worker when a equivalently skilled local worker is available. The advantage for this use case is plain - it helps the hiring company save money and I don't blame them. I do blame our government and U.S. immigration office for not properly auditing and analyzing their policies in order to bring parity to this situation. If an internation worker is more skilled and available for the position, then, by all means, hire them. If there is a qualified local candidate whose only disqualification is being a local resident, then that seems ass-backwards to me.