DHS Admits 600,000 Foreign H-1B Workers in American Jobs

U.S. employers keep roughly 600,000 foreign H-1B visa workers in jobs throughout the United States, according to an unprecedented report released by the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency.

The total number of resident H-1B workers has successfully been kept secret for decades, mainly because Fortune 500 companies do not want voters to recognize the massive outsourcing of jobs for themselves and their college graduate children.

But President Donald Trump has allowed his pro-reform deputies to release the data, likely to boost his June 22 reform plans.

The DHS agency studied the shifting number of H-1Bs working in 2018 and 2019. The resident population usually declines in September as the foreign workers go home or get green cards. For most of the year, the number of working H-1Bs was about 600,000, says the report, titled “H-1B Authorized-to-Work Population Estimate.”

The USCIS report admits that “no unique identifier exists for all H-1B petitions in the USCIS electronic [system of record, so] we use a methodology of statistical inference.”

“There is no count, so they had to estimate,” said John Miano, a lawyer at the Immigration Reform Law Institute. He said:

The whole thing is astounding. For years, [DHS] has deliberately not stored [visa worker] information into their databases. They only enter selected information into the computers. That was deliberate so that no one could know what is going on. We have sent in all kinds of [Freedom of Information Act] requests, and often the response is ‘we don’t keep track of that.’

The calculation is poorly explained, so “the estimate would be much more believable if that whole process had been explained carefully,” said David North, an expert with the Center for Immigration Studies. “Close to a quarter of the records — dealing with workers who often make $100,000 a year or more — there is no SSN,” he added. “What an admission!”

The failure to track legitimate H-1B documents and workers — or to punish groups for using fake H-1B documents — is routine. For many years, business advocates have kept legislators in the dark by splitting and subdividing oversight of the visa-worker economy between the Departments of State, Homeland Security, and Labor, he said.

This fragmentation has helped to minimize awareness of the scale among journalists and the public. For example, very few reporters describe the scale of the H-1B population to their readers, and most rely on talking points from business advocates who say the program brings in 65,000 or 85,000 “high skilled” workers each year when companies cannot fund U.S. workers.

In reality, up to 85,000 H-1B visas are given out to companies each year, while roughly 15,000 are provided to non-profit groups, including hospitals, research centers, government agencies, and hospitals.

The new USCIS report does not estimate the number of fake H-1B documents in circulation despite myriad cases of fraudulent work permits and made-in-China green cards. For example, Indian-owned subcontract companies duplicate valid H-1Bs to provide work documents for illegal immigrants because the U.S. managers at the prime contractors “don’t check anything,” said an American who migrated into the United States as an Indian H-1B worker.” It happens all the time.”