Federal Investigation Warns DHS About Graduate Fraud in Visa Jobs

graduate university student
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Neil Munro

Federal agencies must work harder to prevent Indian and Chinese college graduates fraudulently getting work visas and jobs which are needed by their U.S. counterparts, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.

The report hides most details of the GAO’s investigation, partly because the profits from white collar labor trafficking cause routine and widespread fraud. In the last few years, for example, the Department of Homeland Security had dissolved several fake universities which used fraud to get real work permits for hundreds of Indians and Chinese graduates.

The report says DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has tightened oversight since officials discovered some of the 9/11 jihad murderers had used the program to practice flying aircraft:

We also used publicly available hardware, software, and materials to produce counterfeit or fictitious documents, which we submitted, as appropriate for our testing. We then documented any actions taken by SEVP on the submitted petitions, such as requests to provide additional supporting documentation, among other potential actions.

…

We also found that ICE followed its established procedures and specifically identified GAO’s fraudulent petitions or otherwise took appropriate steps to prevent the petitions from moving forward in the process during our three Multiple universities have been independent covert tests of SEVP internal controls over the school certification process.

The report is titled “Student and Exchange Visitor Program: DHS Can Take Additional Steps to Manage Fraud Risks Related to School Recertification and Program Oversight.

Multiple universities and individuals have been investigated for fraudulently issuing work permits via the Curricular Practical training and “Optional Practical Training” programs which deliver at least 250,000 white-collar workers to U.S. employers each year

The fraudulent operations include the San Diego International Academy of English and Southern States University in 2011,  Herguan University and the University of East-West Medicine in 2012, the New York-based Micropower Career Institute in 2014,  and the Tri-Valley University in 2014.

Federal individuals have also tagged three Korean managers in 2015, Daniel Cabanillas at Mercyhurst University in 2017, several Chinese students in 2018, five people in 2019, and Findream in 2019.

U.S. officials have also set up fake universities to catch cheating students and labor brokers. These include the University of Northern New Jersey in 2016 and the University of Farmington in 2019.

The fraud is not a victimless crime because it pumps more foreign graduates into the U.S. labor market, so helping to suppress salaries for American graduates.

Already, government programs legally provide work permits for a labor force of roughly 1.5 million foreign contract workers who hold white-collar jobs in the United States. Those workers include the OPT graduates, as well as foreign workers in the H-1B, J-1, E-2, TN, H4EAD and L-1 programs.

The pressure from foreign graduates to get work permits is huge — and the number of potential cheaters is also huge. For example, there are roughly 200,000 Indian students in the United States, many of whom hope to win valuable green cards via the university-run Optional Practical Training and corporate-run H-1B work visa programs.

“As of March 2018, more than 1.2 million foreign students in the United States were enrolled in 8,744 schools,” said the report, which continued:

In our 2011 and 2012 reports on student visas, we identified instances in which fraudulent schools exploited the U.S. immigration system by knowingly reporting to SEVP that foreign students were fulfilling their immigration status requirements, such as maintaining a full course load, when they were not attending school or were attending intermittently. In addition, we reported that terrorist attacks in the United States have pointed to the need for close monitoring and oversight of foreign  students. For example, one of the September 11, 2001, terrorists entered the country on a student visa and subsequently attended flight schools.

The GAO report urges DHS official to hire more inspectors, investigate, demand earlier filing of updated documents, and verify the bona fides of top executives at universities, train and supervise the university officials who are supposed to ensure compliance with federal rules. The recommendations suggest that some of the university officials moved from one fraud university to another fraud university, hid their real identity.

Immigration Numbers:

Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university. This total includes about 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in business or health care, engineering or science, software, or statistics.

But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately 1 million H-1B workers and spouses — and about 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.

The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.

This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it transfers wages to investors and ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.

This policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor also shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations.

The cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.

The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the Heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, undermines suburbia, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.

 

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