Visa Abuse

The national government in India heavily promotes its citizens coming to the United States to work. They perceive it to be in their interests.

Many of these visa holders enter the fields of technology and medicine within American companies. A couple of articles illustrate what has been happening, of which many Americans are unaware.

The first discusses an expanding Department of Justice program to deal with crime associated with “legal” migration:

The news created concern among companies that sideline American graduates in favor of hiring cheap, and subordinate foreign white-collar workers, often via the mixed-skill H-1B, J-1, H4EAD, B-1/B-2, CPT, and OPT programs. Those programs are heavily used by clannish Indian managers and their subordinate workers, with the strong backing of India’s government...

But the news was applauded by Americans who see blatant and continuous discrimination against American graduates, usually by the Indian-born hiring managers and recruiters who now dominate many hiring and recruitment offices across the nation...

Indian-born managers in the United States routinely fire skilled, productive American professionals before selling their jobs to kickback-paying Indian contract workers, according to Americans and Indians who have worked under these Indian-style office politics. The anti-merit office politics are echoed by many Twitter comments.

Indians dominate the contractor business and also dominate the business of recruiting technology experts for contract jobs. They often exclude American professionals during job searches to favor subordinated, kickback-paying Indians, said Palmer...

U.S. executives ignore the nationwide anti-American discrimination, partly because it shrinks the workplace clout of U.S. professionals. 

Another article states that 40 percent of illegal immigrants are here because of overstaying visas. Once again, Indians are a significant slice of this problem:

Now, the Trump administration is also attacking on the other front, this weekend warning Indians not to overstay U.S. visas or risk lifetime bans to the country.

As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, the absolute number of Indian visa overstayers in FY of 2023 was around 19,000 – rank 7 among nations, but the highest-ranking non-Latin American or Caribbean country. In FY 2016, this was still as high as 25,000 people. 

The stock of undocumented Indian immigrants was most recently estimated at 725,000 people – rank 3 after Mexico and El Salvador. 

Once again, most Americans are unaware of the extent of the problem.