H-1B Visa Fraud Alleged in Iowa (and a Defense of the H-1B program!)
U.S. Attorney Matt Whitaker announced yesterday that his office and federal immigration enforcement authorities had uncovered an alleged scheme here in Iowa involving the H-1B visa program. Whitaker alleged that U.S. computer companies Vision Systems Group Inc. and Pacific West Corp claimed to have H-1B employees located in Iowa, when in fact, the H-1B employees were actually located in larger coastal cities. If you're not familiar with the H-1B program, you're probably wondering why and how this would be a crime.
Employers of H-1B workers are required to pay these employees at least the minimum of the "prevailing wage" for the specific occupation in the specific geographic area where the employee will be working. Because of cost-of-living differences and a host of other economic factors, the prevailing wage for a software engineer working in Des Moines, IA, is considerably lower than the prevailing wage for a software engineer working in Manhattan or Los Angeles. So, basically, Whitaker is alleging that the computer companies were claiming that their H-1B employees were working in Iowa, when in fact they were working in coastal cities, so that the employer could pay the employees considerably less money.
If true, this is an unwelcome development, and certainly an incident Sen. Charles Grassley and other anti-H-1Bers will point to as an example of the the visa program's supposed inherent evil. For the uninitiated, the H-1B visa program allows the U.S. government to issue a total of 65,000 visas per year to foreign workers who qualify for an H-1B visa and want to come work for U.S. employers. In order to qualify for an H-1B visa, the hiring company must have a position available that qualifies as a "specialty occupation". In very general terms, a specialty occupation is one that requires a minimum of a bachelor's degree in a related field of study. Further, the position must be an occupation that requires a theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge. And of course, the worker's educational and professional background must fit the specialty occupation.
As this scandal unfolds across the 6 other states cited by Whitaker, my concern is that these bad apples will be held up by anti-immigration forces as a reason to eliminate or severely restrict the H-1B program. A short-sighted measure of this nature would be an unmitigated economic disaster.
The H-1B visa is the primary vehicle through which immigrant entrepreneurs enter the United States. And according to Vivek Wadhwa, a senior research associate at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, more than half of Silicon Valley start-ups were founded by immigrants over the last decade. These immigrant-founded tech companies employed 450,000 workers and had sales of $52 billion in 2005 alone. Furthermore, a recent study by William Kerr of Harvard Business School and William Lincoln of the University of Michigan found that in periods when H-1B visa numbers went down, so did patent applications filed by immigrants in the U.S. And when H-1B visa numbers went up, patent applications also increased. If we truly want our country to be the world's preeminent knowledge-based economy, why would we make it more difficult for the world's most entrepreneurial minds to legally find their way to the United States?
For every U.S. employer who abuses the H-1B visa, there are thousands who use the program appropriately, in accordance with the strict letter of the law. With our economy on very unsteady footing, now is not the time to be placing additional restrictions on the H-1B program. The system already has safeguards in place, they simply need to be enforced. So, as long as these H-1B related arrests don't create a backlash against the H-1B program as a whole, they are a good thing. The arrests prove that the appropriate safeguards already exist to hold accountable employers who chose to utilize the H-1B program. Here's to hoping that cooler legislative heads prevail.
