Turns Out the H-1B ‘Lotto System’ Is Totally and Completely Rigged

The H-1B “war” of 2024 is destined to go down in social media history. It’s equal parts productive and chaotic, with pro-foreign worker advocates like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy squaring off against America First MAGA forces. Ultimately, this debate is a healthy exercise for the America First movement, airing its internal conflicts—especially before Trump’s anticipated return to the White House.

{snip}

Honestly, we’re dealing with a system so broken it’s beyond repair—especially the so-called “lotto” system at the heart of the entire H-1B scheme. Calling it “rigged” would actually be a compliment.

Yes, it’s really that bad.

Eric Fan:

Every year, a lottery determines who gets an H-1B visa to work in the US. The game, it turns out, is rigged.

Outsourcing and staffing firms are exploiting loopholes, crowding out US employers and immigrants who play it fair.

We have exclusive data to show it for the 1st time

Congress created H-1B in 1990 to help American businesses get the world’s top talent. Instead, outsourcing and staffing firms flooded the system.

They bring in lower-level workers and pay lower wages. They game the lottery to gain unfair advantages.

Say you’re a regular American business that wants to hire a foreign graduate from a top US university. You would lose the candidate to lottery most (70%) of the time. That’s what happened to Sandeep Maganti, a talented engineer from India who founded his own startup.

An outsourcing firm, however, can draw from its vast workforce in India and put in 3X number of tickets. It doesn’t care who gets selected as long as somebody gets selected. @USCIS rules require a “legitimate job offer” for each lottery entry, but don’t require any proof.

We then identified 3000+ IT staffing firms, often called Body Shops or Desi Consultancies. Many cheated on a massive scale to submit multiple entries for the same candidates. The government called it fraud. Yet there’s little consequence. Many kept winning new visas this year.

One group of staffing firms entered each candidate as many as 15 times. The government flagged them in a damning report last year but didn’t name the companies. We matched details in their data to reveal the owner behind them.  @USCIS says it cannot sanction companies.

This April,  @USCIS changed lottery rules to remove the incentives for multi-reg. But that’s only part of the problem. Staffing firms continue to flood the lottery with dubious entries. Even among their single-reg candidates, staffers fail to file a petition half of the time.

Clearly, this entire program is nothing more than a massive scam—a blatant slap in the face to the American people. You can read the full story here.

But the fraud doesn’t stop there, folks. It’s likely far worse than most people realize, with much of it centering around something called “visa bodyshops.”

Ashley St. Clair:

A big shot employment attorney in California called me last night re: H1B visa fraud / trafficking of workers. Here’s what she said:

The market is cornered by visa body shops who apply for ~50% of the visas.

The economics of it: These body shops are headed by former hiring managers from Big Tech companies. They bring people to America, rent apartments for them, and house about 10 together in one apartment.

They put these recipients through a ~4 week bootcamp of basic tech training, fraudulently rewrite their resumes, teach them how to interview.

The body shops land them jobs, primarily at the companies these hiring managers came from, and pay the workers less than half of the money in hand.

Ex. Job is listed as a $200k salary, but the company is contracted with the body shop *not* the H1B worker, and the worker is actually paid closer to $40 an hour.

The body shops pocket most of the money and are making millions by essentially trafficking people.

The abuse and fraud must end!

{snip}