Infosys, the Indian body shop heavily dependent on H-1B high-tech workers, has pled guilty to massive violations of the Immigration and Nationality Act, admitting that it brought in thousands of Indian workers as B-1 business visitors when in reality their employees were not temporary visitors for business purposes, but entering the United States with the intent to perform work properly classified at that for H-1B visa holders. This blog had the news two years ago.
The New York Times October 28, 2013 by Julia Preston
Federal prosecutors in Texas have reached a civil settlement with Infosys, an Indian outsourcing company, over charges that it misused temporary visas to bring Indian technology workers to the United States, justice officials said. In an investigation started in February 2011, prosecutors have examined whether Infosys systematically used short-term visitor visas to bring software programmers and technology engineers from India to work in American companies, instead of more costly H-1B visas, deceiving immigration authorities and undercutting wages for American workers. Infosys has said it set aside $35 million for the settlement, which will be announced on Wednesday.
Infosys and its doppelganger Tata are, of course, major violators of immigration and civil rights laws. Both have a business model of contracting information technology services in the United States by replacing American workers with cheaper Indian nationals, mainly with the H-1B program. However, even though the quota for H-1Bs has not been filled in the past five years or so, though that has changed for Fiscal Year 2014, the cost of H-1Bs became a concern and Infosys and most likely Tata as well, went further in their fraud, replacing and augmenting their H-1B workforce with Indian nationals coming to the United States on B-1 visas, which do not entail considerable application expense.
However, the idea of using temporary business visitors as substitution for H-1B visa workers is not new. Boeing was caught in 2011 doing the same thing that Infosys is being fined $35 million for. Interesting that Infosys is being fined for the same crime that the regime overlooks in others. Especially interesting in that Obama has likened himself to Indians, self-identifying as a desi, a term used among Indians to denote high-caste light skinned Hindus. But in any event, Americans are the losers. Of course, $35 million is just the cost of doing business for Infosys. Note that it was well prepared ahead of time, suggesting that the immigration fraud was a business model.
