I am Not Surprised

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that companies are colluding to game the H-1B visa guest worker program.

Finding corruption in the H-1B system, and the related L-1 visa, is not a surprised.  Notwithstanding the stated purpose of these programs, to allow companies to hire foreign employees where there are no domestic alternatives, these programs are actually designed to be a corrupt way for employers to get cheap labor and suppress wages.

Cheating is the point of the programs:

The Biden administration says it has found evidence that several dozen small technology companies have colluded to increase the chances that their prospective foreign hires will win a coveted H-1B visa for skilled foreign workers in this year’s lottery.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency that awards H-1B visas, said it has found that a small number of companies are responsible for entering the same applicants into the lottery multiple times, with the alleged goal of artificially boosting their chances of winning a visa. The findings were laid out in a notice to employers viewed by The Wall Street Journal and set to be released Friday.

That practice, according to the agency, is in large part responsible for inflating demand for the visas to a record high this year, with 781,000 entries into the lottery for 85,000 visa slots.

The solution to the problem is fairly straightforward:

• Make the lotteries monthly rather than yearly, reducing the stakes, and making it easier for smaller companies with actual needs for specific skills to participate.
• Change the lottery for visa slots into a bidding process.  The price will reach a level where companies looking for cheap labor, which is technically against the law, will no longer have an economic incentive to participate.

Of course, this will never happen, because that is not what the program is really about.

………

A much greater share of the increase, the data shows, can be attributed to applicants whose names were submitted by multiple companies. A large proportion of the duplicate entries, the immigration agency says, were submitted by a handful of the same companies. Some 96,000 people submitted multiple visa entries, for a total of about 408,000 entries.

Though it isn’t technically illegal for a foreign worker to have multiple companies submit visa applications on their behalf, companies submitting applications must attest that they have a real job for the employee in question if they win a visa. If companies that win a visa then quickly contract an employee out to third parties, or lay off an employee on the visa so he or she can switch companies, that could potentially amount to fraud.

Of course it's fraud.  That is a feature of this system not a bug.