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Federal Prosecutors Actually Prosecute H1-B Fraud (ap.org)
Slashdot reader McGruber reports that federal prosecutors "have filed conspiracy charges against a part-owner of two information technology firms and an employee for fraudulently using the H-1B program". Both were reportedly recruiting foreign IT workers, according to the AP:
Prosecutors said the conspirators falsely represented that the foreign workers had full-time positions and were paid an annual salary [when] the workers were only paid when placed at a third-party client, and the defendants sometimes generated false payroll records... The defendants are charged with conspiracy to commit visa fraud and obstruct justice and conspiracy to harbor aliens.
They're now facing up to 15 years in prison for an "alien-harboring conspiracy" charge -- with a maximum penalty of up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine -- and a separate visa fraud and obstruction of justice charge with a maximum 5-year penalty and a $250,000 fine.
They're now facing up to 15 years in prison for an "alien-harboring conspiracy" charge -- with a maximum penalty of up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine -- and a separate visa fraud and obstruction of justice charge with a maximum 5-year penalty and a $250,000 fine.
It's not news to hear them take down trivial targets, let's hear it when they actually take down bigger fish - the kind that result in citizens (especially long-term unemployed) being hired in their place.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Not a chance, big fish have too many campaign contributions.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The problem with this whole program is that they can't go after companies that violate the spirit of the law. In this case, the government was clearly responding to an actual fraud (falsification of records, etc.)
I don't really have a problem with the H-1B program, in its original form. Before all the loopholes were discovered, it provided a useful way to get very highly skilled people into the US to work on projects. The thing I don't like seeing is the whole wave of body shops that are clearly using the law to bring people in house who are clearly not highly skilled, but work cheap enough to displace a native employee. I'm a reasonably senior systems integration engineer, and it's clear that the Tatas and Infosys's of the world aren't bringing in Ph. D. geniuses to work as routine DBAs and coders. My team and I get a lot of the output of these folks and have to make it work in the real world...it isn't ground breaking innovative stuff. The other thing that I've seen the offshore firms use H-1Bs for is a rotating "train your replacement" team. When they hook another company for an IT outsourcing deal, this is the team that gets sent in to collect procedures and send the work offshore. When the press picks up on stories like this, these teams are usually the ones the workers are talking about when they say they're being shadowed and forced to document their jobs.
I really think it's going to take massive unemployment in sectors other than IT for the loopholes to be closed. When the BPO firms start coming for the professional accountants and other "expensive" talent as well as IT, people might notice and/or sympathize. I think lots of people really think that IT folks are way overpaid and don't totally understand the job, cost of living differences, etc. It also doesn't help that there are a lot of people inside and outside of IT that express the opinion that all of the displaced workers were "old fossils" who don't keep up. I'm old and spend a ton of time keeping up, so I hate getting lumped in with this crowd....but at least I'm still employed!
Which is exactly why Trump proposes a useless wall that anyone with a ladder can get climb over.
If the real goal was to stem illegal immigration simply having and enforcing high penalties on employers of illegal workers would take care of the problem.
The whole idea of the wall is to convince simpletons and the uneducated that you will do something, when you really don't intend to.
Same with the H1B visa program. On paper it is actually a very good thing: it allows you to bring workers from abroad in cases of local shortages. However, in practice it is being used to bring Indian IT workers which are trained by the US IT workers they are replacing. We do not need to change the H1B program, we need to make sure it is used the way the law says it should. Why it doesn't? just like the parent post side, employers make the proper campaign contributions to make sure it doesn't happen.
An the pour worker gets $40/hour. This is a story I see more and more often. An authorize contracting company will supply us a candidate. We hire the candidate at the agreed upon rate of $100/hour. We find out later after he is on board that he has a second contracting company who is his prime contracting agency. This prime agency is not an authorize company to deal with my company. The resulting pay per hour after the authorized contracting company takes their 30-40% and the prime contracting company takes their 30-40% is that pour worker gets $40-$50 per hour. It gets worse, after the period of time that the worker has performed well and we wanted to hire them and transfer the H1-B to my company, the prime contracting company says that if he does this they will report to the government that he didn't actually work in the US. We found out later that they were paying them in Rupee in India. Loopholes are for the dishonest and greedy.
I hope this caused some synapses to fire.
It's not news to hear them take down trivial targets, let's hear it when they actually take down bigger fish
Taking down easy targets is what the beginning of taking down hard targets looks like. Enforcing H1-B laws at all is rare enough that even the small fry are newsworthy. Lets hope there's some actual follow-through.
The H1-B laws as written are pretty good: you have to pay at least average, and you must have at least tried to hire a US citizen. We all know companies that cheat on this, but I've worked for plenty that don't cheat. It's easy to know the cheaters, because all, or nearly all, low-level employees are H1-Bs.
Companies just trying to fill reqs with qualified people will have a real mix of citizens, green cards, and various visas. That's what it looks like when you're desperate to hire, and you'll find a way to hire anyone who gets through your interviews: a diverse mess of immigration statuses. And, importantly, they're all employees, not any outsourcing going on.
OTOH, if you're a body-shop outsourcing company that just competes on price, it's almost all H1-Bs (except some management), no one on green card track, everyone underpaid, so damn easy to see what's happening there. If only the federal government gave a fuck.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Illegal immigrants do not qualify for welfare. Their children do, in relatively small amounts. The average illegal immigrant comes to America looking for a job and crime rates of illegal immigrants are the lowest among all racial groups, including whites.
Which brings us to this famous bit of evidence...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The people in the HR "profession" actually have seminars in how to avoid hiring American workers.
You might be right about the program design itself, but the program is gamed in a HUGE way and the US Government knows it and turns a blind eye. If they would simply do some audits and enforce the law this could be partially curbed, but they don't. Corporatist administrations do not care.
Been eating those old paint chips again, haven't you? For starters, the crime rate of illegal immigrants is 100%, because illegal immigration is a crime. Beyond that, hit-and-run collisions and drunk driving are disproportionately high in the illegal immigrant community. If they're working, that's another crime. (They're either not paying Social Security and other income-related taxes, or if they are they're doing it on false SS numbers.) They're the main consumers of forged and stolen IDs, which is how they get around welfare requirements.
Oh - and illegal immigrants aren't a "racial group".
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What the H1B program does is emphatically penalise the competitiveness of companies that train their own. How can US companies that do that right thing and spend millions on training against companies that spend on lobbyists and cheat bringing cheap foreign employees. So every company went from paying for training to demanding trained people for free and unwilling to pay anything for it, not reasonable wages, not taxes to pay for that training and let alone the crazy idea of paying for the training themselves. Yet another part of the collapse in US society.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I'd be curious to see where you get your data. For some reason it's very difficult to find hard data on crime by illegal immigrants. Texas is one of the few states that keeps track of it and there illegals for the period of 2011 to 2015 committed about 7.5 percent of the murders in that state. Given that illegals are estimated to be about 6 percent of the population of the state that's probably slightly higher than average but not seriously higher and probably within a margin of error. I really don't have a problem with people from Mexico coming to the US but I think it's only reasonable to expect them to register and apply for a green card. I don't really get why people think it's okay for 11 million people to just come here and set up shop without documentation. Sure, the wall is a stupid idea and I'm sure it's just Trump being his blowhard self. I figure even he knows it's not going to happen. I really think though that these people should be required to comply with the law.
Which brings us to this famous bit of evidence...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The people in the HR "profession" actually have seminars in how to avoid hiring American workers.
You might be right about the program design itself, but the program is gamed in a HUGE way and the US Government knows it and turns a blind eye. If they would simply do some audits and enforce the law this could be partially curbed, but they don't. Corporatist administrations do not care.
I don't see anything wrong with it. You're making a huge mountain out of one quote that makes perfect sense in the larger context of the legal framework.
It's not the HR department/ immigration lawyer's job to fill the position. As far as they are concerned that position is filled. The law requires them to advertise the position and they do advertise the position. It is the responsibility of the local worker seeking job opportunity to find the advertisement and apply for it.
He is talking about something called the PERM process. It is excruciatingly stacked up against the foreign worker. You're asking the foreign worker to put up their job on the line to apply for the green card where she is not allowed to use any experience she has on the job to qualify for her job, and anyone with the bare minimum qualifications can take it away.
There is absolutely no mention of how to avoid American workers. They put the job on the newspaper, job/school job website and their own website. What else are they supposed to do?
Also, the US government puts these application under the microscope. They take 4-6 months to analyze the application and if anything feels out of place (like a strange requirement in the job duties) they will reject the application. Each and every approved application is published on the DOL website for everyone to see.
I don't see anything wrong with it. You're making a huge mountain out of one quote that makes perfect sense in the larger context of the legal framework.
They're literally having whole seminars on how to craft job requirements such that you cannot fill them, specifically so that you can hire a H1B and treat them like a slave. That's not one quote. That's systemic abuse.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"