Americans were told for thirty years that the H-1B visa program was bringing 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. At minimum.

Turns out, that analogy isn’t far off.

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 kids are doing everything right — earning their degrees, building their skills — and getting shut out of careers that were supposed to be waiting for them.

So where exactly are all these “jobs Americans can’t do”?

A confession from the inside

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. This isn’t some disgruntled ex-employee with an axe to grind — this is a man who makes money off the program. In an interview with Mark Halperin, Wadhwa let the mask slip.

From Breitbart, quoting Vivek Wadhwa:

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.

Let that settle. One in four. Do the math: that’s roughly 170,000 people currently holding jobs that belong to Americans, built on fabricated credentials.

And Wadhwa wasn’t done. He also conceded what American workers have known in their bones for years: “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.”

Washington is finally paying attention

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. Better late than never, I suppose. But these aren’t small-bore reforms — they’re acknowledgments that the rot runs deep.

What it really costs us

Here’s what keeps me up at night. 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 little confession was strategic — he’s trying to save the broader program by throwing the “body shops” overboard. But he revealed more than he intended. When even the people getting rich off a system admit it’s a quarter fraudulent and suppresses American wages, how much more evidence do we need?

The only question left is whether Washington has the spine to act on what everyone now knows.

Key Takeaways

• A Silicon Valley investor who profits from H-1B visas admitted 20-25% involve fraud.
• Roughly 170,000 foreign workers may hold American jobs based on fabricated credentials.
• U.S. computer science graduates face a 26% unemployment and underemployment rate.
• The DOJ and Labor Department are finally investigating H-1B fraud as criminal enterprise.

Sources: Breitbart