Foreign H-1B visa workers received starting salaries about 10 percent less than their American counterparts at Deloitte, a multinational accounting firm whose wage data was hacked and published.
The H-1B visa program, created by former President George H.W. Bush, allows companies to import hundreds of thousands of foreign workers — primarily from India and China — to take white-collar American jobs under the guise that there is a “labor shortage,” particularly in STEM occupations.
For years, Breitbart News has chronicled the abuses against white-collar American professionals as a result of the H-1B visa program. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News.
Research, published in the September issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, reviewed wage data that was hacked from Deloitte to compare starting wages for foreign H-1B visa workers with their American counterparts.
Deloitte paid foreign H-1B visa workers about 10 percent less than Americans doing the same line of work, the results showed.
“We observe that relative to U.S. citizen new hires — matched on office, position, and time of hire — newly hired accountants with H-1B visas receive starting salaries that are lower by approximately 10%,” the researchers found:
We find, in line with the cost savings argument, that a Big 4 firm pays H-1B visa holders in tax and audit lower starting wages than U.S. citizen peer hires. There are several other explanations besides a desire to save on wage costs that could drive this wage discount (such as a difference in English communication skills or an attempt to recoup the considerable filing fees involved in hiring an H-1B worker). We are unable to identify the exact driver of this discrepancy, but our results are at least consistent with the pattern predicted by H-1B critics. In our secondary tests, we find no evidence that H-1B workers are substitutes for U.S. citizens in accounting, but rather some weak evidence of complementarities. That is, controlling for office size and growth, U.S. citizen new hires are paid slightly more in offices that have recently hired an H-1B visa holder in a peer role. [Emphasis added]
The wage data confirms accusations that the H-1B visa program is used across several industries to cut labor costs for companies while crowding American professionals out of jobs that would otherwise go to them.
About a year ago, laid-off American professionals — who say they were replaced with Indian H-1B visa workers — scored a $4.65 million settlement against Indian outsourcing firm Larsen & Toubro Infotech (LTI).
The initial lawsuit brought by the laid-off Americans said LTI deployed a “four-pronged policy” of anti-American discrimination to ensure that jobs went to Indian H-1B visa workers:
First, LTI allegedly maintains an “inventory” of “visa ready” workers from India to fill positions at the company by petitioning the federal government’s lottery program to obtain a large amount of H-1b visas, and preferences hiring from this pool of applicants over U.S. citizens and visa-ready individuals not from South Asia (in particular, India). [Emphasis added]
…
Second, LTI’s internal and third-party recruiters in the United States disproportionately select South Asian and Indian applicants located in the United States over non-South Asian, non-Indian applicants located in the United States, even if applicants are less qualified. [Emphasis added]
Third, LTI promotes South Asian, Indian, visa holders at disproportionately high rates, in particular by giving these workers higher scores on their quarterly and annual employee appraisals. [Emphasis added]
Fourth, and finally, LTI terminates non-South Asian, non-Indian, and non-visa holders at disproportionately higher rates, in part because these workers are relegated to the “bench” more often and then are not staffed on more projects. [Emphasis added]
Most prominently, the Department of Justice (DOJ) settled with Facebook over its lawsuit that the tech corporation had discriminated against qualified Americans for jobs, preferring to hire foreign H-1B visa workers.
Recently, Americans detailed to Bloomberg News how Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation discriminated against Americans using the H-1B visa program.
One such insider at Cognizant was Abby Israel, who was hired to ensure that federal anti-discrimination laws were being followed. What she discovered was shocking:
In 2018, Israel’s team produced an internal report that found large racial disparities in rates of “involuntary terminations” at Cognizant over the first eight months of the year. Black employees were let go at a rate 23 times that of Asian [mostly Indian] workers, the data showed. For Hispanic or Latino employees, the rate was 16 times the rate of their Asian counterparts. For White workers, it was eight times as high. (The Asian workers were overwhelmingly from India and were working on [H-1B and other] visas, according to the report.) Israel told the jury that those were some of the most extreme racial disparities she’d ever seen. She also said that when she reached out to Cognizant’s hiring managers with those findings, her supervisor told her to stop sharing the data beyond HR leaders. [Emphasis added]
In December 2022, the DOJ announced a settlement with Secureapp Technologies, whose Fortune 500 clients include Pfizer, Comcast, Deloitte, JPMorgan Chase, FedEx, and Nike, after the firm was found to have discriminated against qualified Americans, hiring foreign H-1B visa workers from India instead.
Another infamous case involved the defunct biotech corporation Theranos, whose founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, was convicted of fraud and conspiracy. Holmes, along with her partner and former boyfriend Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, had raked in billions in investments from 2003 to 2015 by claiming that Theranos’s nanotechnology could retrieve tiny blood samples from patients and test them for a myriad of illnesses and diseases.
Holmes and Balwani used the H-1B visa program to keep their employees quiet and compliant, even as the fraud scheme unraveled, according to John Carreyrou’s bombshell reporting.
“For the dozens of Indians Theranos employed, the fear of being fired was more than just the dread of losing a paycheck. Most were on H-1B visas and dependent on their continued employment at the company to remain in the country,” Carreyrou reported in his book.
“With a despotic boss like Sunny holding their fates in his hands, it was akin to indentured servitude,” Carreyrou reported. “Sunny, in fact, had the master-servant mentality common among an older generation of Indian businessmen. Employees were his minions.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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