Indian National to Be Deported After Profiting $20M by Fraudulently Importing H-1B Foreign Workers

An Indian national who pocketed $20 million by fraudulently importing foreign workers through the H-1B visa program to the U.S. will be deported after he completes time in federal prison.

Raju Kosuri, a 45-year-old Indian-born U.S. resident, pleaded guilty to operating a cheap labor business where he brought nearly 1,000 foreign workers to the U.S. on the H-1B visa through fraudulent applications, according to the Washington Post.

Every year, more than 100,000 foreign workers are brought to the U.S. on the H-1B visa and are allowed to stay for up to six years. That number has ballooned to potentially hundreds of thousands each year, as universities and non-profits are exempt from the cap. With more entering the U.S. through the visa, Americans are often replaced and forced to train their foreign replacements.

Kosuri used his fraud foreign-importing business to bring his wife, 46-year-old Smriti Jharia, to the U.S. on a fraudulent H-1B visa. The two are the parents of an “anchor baby,” the term used to describe a U.S.-born child who is given birthright citizenship despite their parents being foreign nationals.

Kosuri was supposed to be given a tougher sentence, but U.S. District Judge ­Leonie M. Brinkema passed down a mere 28 months for the massive fraud scheme after she said there were issues with the prosecution’s case. When Kosuri completes the sentence, he and his wife, along with their anchor baby, will be deported from the U.S.

In a court filing on the case, Assistant United States Attorney Jack Hanly wrote:

If fraud like [Kosuri’s] becomes too prevalent, the result may be that the H-1B process is severely cut back. That would be a major setback for those who use the program honestly and benefit from its availability.

A year after Kosuri entered the U.S. as a legal immigrant in 1999, he began the fraudulent business where he set up multiple companies that were solely designed to import Indian workers to the U.S. on the H-1B visa, but that at the time he claimed provided technology services.

In return, after importing nearly a thousand Indian workers, Kosuri sent the workers to various corporations that used the cheap labor and paid him for the service of getting them the workers. In one instance, Kosuri and his wife even tried to obtain a federal contract through the Small Business Administration.

The H-1B visa often serves as the first step of outsourcing Americans’ jobs for multinational corporations. For example, multiple laid off American workers have previously explained to Breitbart News that companies use the H-1B visa to originally import foreign workers to do their jobs for cheaper, though eventually, the goal is to send the foreign worker and the job back to their native country where they can further reduce the labor cost.

President Trump’s administration has enacted multiple reforms — with more to come — to protect American workers from being replaced by H-1B foreign workers.

Under United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Lee Francis Cissna, new guidelines have been enacted that mandate vetting of foreign workers currently holding U.S. jobs on H-1B visas. This is a break from previous administration’s guidelines which gave a green light to H-1B foreign workers who were already in the U.S.