Pre-PERM rush involved some fraud

The Portland Press Herald recently did a series on immigration to investigate fraud in the H-1B program in Maine. The investigation was triggered when a number of applications for the H-1B and permanent residency programs began to come through the local Labor Department for labor certifications. The investigations discovered a few companies using addresses in Maine to circumvent the prewailing wage criteria for jobs that actually existed in places like New Jersey. Maine is a rural state with very limited high-tech industry with lower wages and such high number of applications was suspect.

As the boxes of paperwork piled up in Maine and other rural states, foreign labor experts came to understand what they were seeing: Small companies moving ahead of federal immigration system changes scheduled for March 28, 2005 (PERM), were flocking to rural states, hoping that their applications for foreign labor would be processed quickly and efficiently.

While both opponents and supporters of the H-1B visa program cannot agree more that abuses should be prevented and punished, the differentiation occurs in how the abuses are presented to the regular folks. The fraud factor is really low here, about 1 percent or so. There's more fraud in Medicare, so should we stop Medicare too? Genuine users of Medicare deserve better if the abuses are detected and stopped. Same is the case with the H-1B. Stop the abuses not the program. Add to this the fact that some politicians use this for fear mongering so prevelant these days.

"I think what your series teaches us is that it isn't enough just to tighten security at our borders, that as long as legitimate visa programs like the H1B program can be so easily manipulated or subjected to outright fraud, that border security - while important - is an incomplete answer," said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

"Is it possible to game the system? I guess it is," said Theodore Ruthizer, past president and general counsel of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School. "My sense is the allegations of fraud and abuse are way overstated and they're not a serious problem."