Indian-American investor Vivek Wadhwa recently said that he’s aware that 20-25% of people who come to the US on H-1B are frauds. In a podcast with Mark Halperin, the India-born Silicon Valley investor spoke about H-1B abuse and Green Card limbo. “See, what happens is that with every government program, there’s also corruption. First of all, 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 per cent of the people who come in on H-1B visas fall in that category,” Wadhwa said.Bodyshops are staffing companies that recruit H-1Bs for client companies. They maintain the payroll of these staff and Wadhwa said that these companies inflate the CVs to bring in H-1Bs. Wadhwa said US recruiters should look at the applications very carefully.“First of all, you only give it to companies that are trustworthy and reliable, not the body shops. This is where the problem happens. You got these body shops who bring them in, who make up resumes, who make up qualifications. The government isn’t going to validate every degree in every country,” Wadhwa who is a supporter of the H-1B visa program said.But he said he won’t recommend increasing H-1B visa numbers for India but he wants Green Card allocation to go up. He said when he applied for a Green Card, he had to wait for only 18 months but now the waiting time is 70 years. Wadhwa said H-1B visa holders who have already applied for a Green Card are stuck in limbo; they can’t change their employers as they have to start their process again.Wadhwa said employers love this situation because they pay the same wages to these people and they know they would not leave the employer because they are already in the Green Card queue.Wadhwa is an Indian-American tech entrepreneur and academic. He is a Distinguished Fellow & Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Engineering at Silicon Valley and a Distinguished Fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School.
