FBI arrests 2 Clinton men

More crackdown on legal immigration.

Vineet Maheshwari, 35, and Fazal Mehmood, also known as Fazal Awan, 49, have been arrested and are set to appear for a hearing Friday in Des Moines.

Affidavits in the cases say both men were allowed to work in the United States because of employer documents filed by Worldwide Software Services or Sana Systems. Court records show that Mehmood and Maheshwari are listed in various immigration documents as president, director, vice president and manager of the companies

According to federal court documents, Maheshwari, originally from India, is accused of fraud and misuse of immigration documents; specifically, he is accused of knowingly and falsely making a document prescribed by statute or regulation as evidence of authorized stay or employment and knowingly making a false statement under oath in an application and document required by immigration laws

More here at: FBI arrests 2 Clinton men

11 Indians arrested for H1B visa and mail fraud

DES MOINES, Iowa — Federal agents arrested 11 individuals in 6 states Wednesday as part of an investigation into suspected visa and mail fraud. Matthew G. Whitaker, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, announced the operation, which was carried out by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in Iowa, California, Massachusetts, Texas, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and New Jersey.

VISION SYSTEMS GROUP, INC., a New Jersey Domestic Profit Corporation, with a branch office in Coon Rapids, Iowa, was also indicted in a ten count federal indictment that included one count of conspiracy, eight counts of mail fraud, and one count of ‘Notice of Forfeiture’ in the amount of $7,400,000.



The people arrested are:

Shiva NEELI, Arrested in Boston, MA
Ramakrishna MAGULURI, Arrested in Atlanta, GA
Villiappan SUBBAIAH, Arrested in Dallas, TX
Suresh POLA, Arrested in Pennsylvania (SAC PHI)
Vishnu REDDY, Arrested in Los Angeles, CA
Chockalingam PALANIAPPAN, Arrested in San Jose, CA
Vijay MYNENI, Arrested in San Jose, CA
Venkata GUDURU, Arrested in New Jersey
Praveen ANDAPALLY, Arrested in New Jersey
Amit JUSTA, Arrested in New Jersey
Karambir YADAV, Arrested in Louisville, KY

More here at USCIS website

Follow up comes in TARP

So, the ground work to introduce anti-H1B provisions was laid out in the AP article last week. As Greg Siskind analyzes below, this was just an attack piece conceived by the folks sympathetic to Programmer's Guild and their likes. In fact the only "experts" the article mentions are John Miano from the Guild and Ron Hira. The follow up to the article was introduced as an amendment to the stimulus bill and was passed by voice vote. As I said a few months ago, the restrictionists will have a party this year putting in all kinds of protectionist rules.

'Buy American' Comes to TARP

The U.S. Senate voted on Feb. 6 to put stricter limits on banks and other recipients of taxpayer money through the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, that want to hire high-skilled workers from overseas under the H-1B visa program. The Senate approved the measure – introduced by Senators Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Bernie Sanders (Independent-Vermont) – by voice vote as an amendment the economic stimulus package President Barack Obama is urging the Senate to pass.

The amendment that passed isn’t as tough as the one Grassley proposed on Feb. 5, which would have prohibited firms from hiring H-1Bs altogether. The modified amendment instead makes TARP recipients jump through extra hoops before they can hire those foreign workers. Specifically, it subjects recipients of TARP funds to the same rules so-called H-1B dependent employers must follow. (An H-1B dependent employer is one whose workers brought in with that visa comprise 15% or more of the employer's total workforce.)

Blame the foreigners

From Greg Siskind's blog:

This morning the Associated Press is running one of the most unfair pieces I've seen in a long time regarding the H-1B visa program. I expect this sort of thing out of the xenophobic fringe press, but the AP is an organization that used to be known for objectivity. The story focuses on the hiring of H-1B workers in the banking sector and is running with the headline "Bailout banks tried to hire foreign workers." Ooh. That's really bad. Lots of Americans losing their jobs and here are these greedy banks hiring cheap foreign workers to replace them. The public has a right to know!

Let's discuss the facts cited in the article first and then we can move on to some of the really biased analysis. The AP's Frank Bass and Rita Beamish (it took two reporters to get a story this wrong?) tell readers that banks receiving more than $150 billion in bailout money hired more than 21,800 foreign workers. Wow. Oh wait, that's over the last six years. So we're talking about 3500 workers a year on average. And some of those years were in a pretty strong economy.

But how much does 3500 even mean? How many workers are there in the banking sector? Quite a lot, actually. According to the Labor Department, even with the economic downturn, there are still more than 8 million workers in the sector. And as of last year around this time, unemployment in the banking sector was just 3.2%. Most of the workers included in the 21,000 were brought in during this extremely low unemployment period.

So let's just be clear - banks seek to fill .04% of their workforce with H-1B workers. The horror!

The AP then goes on to mention that in fiscal year 2008, banks "sought" 4,163 H-1B visas. A couple of points that the reporters failed to mention:

- Fiscal year 2008 actually runs from October 1, 2007 until September 30, 2008. Because of high demand for the H-1B visa, applications must be filed six months ahead of the start of the fiscal year to have any chance so that means these applications were filed in April 2007.

- The number cited is the number of visas sought, not the number actually used. First, only about half of applicants actually got H-1B visas for fiscal year 2008 because of excessive demand. Second, many applicants who are approved for a visa by USCIS don't actually end up claiming the visa at a US consulate and entering to work for the sponsoring employer.

- A lot of those H-1B workers were educated in the US - many receiving MBAs at American universities around the country. We educated these folks so why should we not benefit from their work?

- Just how many H-1B workers in banking have been laid off? I know anecdotally quite a few because I've been helping many people facing sudden unemployment. This is absolutely critical to the story yet it is something left unanswered.

It became apparent to me reading a bit further in the article that this is just a hit piece set up by the same anti-H-1B folks in the high tech sector that have been pushing for protectionism for years. In fact, the only people quoted in the story are Programmers Guild members and Senator Chuck Grassley whose record on this issue speaks for itself. Funny how they can't find a single unemployed banking industry worker they can ask about supposedly training their foreign replacement.

And look at this statement in the story simply recited as fact:

Foreigners are attractive hires because companies have found ways to pay them less than American workers.

Aside from the fact that this is patently untrue, the reporters don't even bother to cite any studies showing this is true. They just state that companies routinely seek to replace more experienced hire paid Americans with these workers. Of course, if this were really possible, I suspect we would see more than .04% of the banking sector filled with H-1B workers. These are greedy bankers after all.

When newspapers that are struggling to survive are shelling out big bucks to the AP to run their wire stories, shouldn't they expect better?

Alberta Welcomes H-1B Visa Holders and Their Families

Temporary skilled worker visa holders: Alberta, Canada welcomes you and your family.

Even if you haven’t yet secured a permanent or full-time position in your field. With your fast-track Alberta Immigrant Nominee Program you could be granted permanent residency and you’ll never have to worry about your visa expiring again. And, you can move here right away. Alberta has the strongest and fastest growing economy in Canada, giving you the security and stability you’ve been searching for. The air is clean, the sky is blue and the people are as friendly as you’ve heard.

Link: http://www.albertacanada.com/immigration/campaigns/h1b.html

Visa Bulletin - February 2009

Here's the latest visa bulletin, as you can see nothing much has changed.

	All Charge-ability Areas Except Those Listed	CHINA- mainland born	INDIA	MEXICO	PHILIP-PINES
Employ-ment -Based
1st	C	C	C	C	C
2nd	C	01JAN05	01JAN04	C	C
3rd	01MAY05	01OCT02	15OCT01	01APR03	01MAY05

New Year 2009

Last year was a bad year for immigration legislation with the Presidential elections looming and no politician willing to take sides. This year with one political party getting a landslide victory in both the Presidential race and the Congressional elections, we may see policy shift to one side or the other. Not to sound cliche, but change is coming.

The economic meltdown means that pro-immigrant groups will have a much tougher job trying to push through their agenda as they try to make the case that immigration laws have to look past and ahead of year-to-year economic climate. Myopic anti-immigration groups will have a much easier task although many of them tend to be in the party that is not in power. We will keep an eye out for the circus to continue.

Visa Bulletin - December 2008

The visa bulletin has been released and is available here:
http://travel.state.gov/visa/frvi/bulletin/bulletin_4384.html

	All Charge-ability Areas Except Those Listed	CHINA- mainland born	INDIA	MEXICO	PHILIP-PINES
Employ-ment -Based
1st	C	C	C	C	C
2nd	C	01JUN04	01JUN03	C	C
3rd	01MAY05	01FEB02	01OCT01	01SEP02	01MAY05

Massive Overhaul of Immigration Services Planned

From Washington Post:

The Bush administration has launched a massive overhaul of the nation's long-troubled immigration services agency, tapping an IBM-led industry consortium to re-invent the way government workers help immigrants obtain visas, seek citizenship and get approval to work in the United States

The agency, which was spun off from the former U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services and merged into the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, receives about 6 million to 8 million applications from immigrants a year, but relies on a pre-computer age, paper-based system of 70 million files identified by immigrants' "A-numbers" or alien registration numbers.

IT Firm Settles With DOL to Pay $1.7 Million Backwage Payment to H-1B Workers

From Attorney Mathew Oh's blog:

DOL has announced that GlobalCynex Inc., a Sterling information technology company, has agreed to pay $1,683,584 to 343 non-immigrant workers after a U.S. Labor Department investigation found the company violated the H-1B visa provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act. An investigation by the department's Wage and Hour Division found that employees hired under the H-1B program were not paid required wages from March 2005 through March 2007. Wage and Hour Division investigators also found that the company charged new H-1B workers training fees ranging from $1,000 to $2,500 that were in violation of the law. Globalcynex reportedly runs operations in Hyderabad, India, and provides offshore services. For the announcement, click here. Reportedly, if the settlement were split evenly among all 343 employees, they would get nearly $5,000 each, and the settlement is one of the largest of its kind involving the H-1B program.

Visa Bulletin - September 2008

The visa bulletin is available here http://travel.state.gov/visa/frvi/bulletin/bulletin_4357.html

E. EMPLOYMENT VISA AVAILABILITY
Item E of the May 2008 Visa Bulletin (number 118, volume VIII) indicated that many Employment cut-off dates had been advancing very rapidly, based on indications that the Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) would need to review a significantly larger pool of applicants than there were numbers available in order to maximize number use under the FY-2008 annual limits. That item also indicated that if the CIS projections proved to be incorrect, it would be necessary to adjust the cut-off dates during the final quarter of FY-2008. The CIS estimates have proven to be very high resulting in: 1) the “unavailability” of all Employment Third preference categories beginning in July, 2) the “unavailability” of numbers for China and India Employment Second preference adjustment of status cases during September, and 3) the establishment of many October Employment cut-off dates which are earlier than those which applied during FY-2008.

Little if any forward movement of the cut-off dates in most Employment categories is likely until the extent of the CIS backlog of old priority dates can be determined. It is estimated that the FY-2009 Employment-based annual limit will be very close to the 140,000 minimum.

FAIR against legal immigration as well!

The FAIR gang is out again with anti-immigration action alerts. Here's their latest. This shows that they make no distinction between legal and illegal immigration even though this bill doesn't add any new visa numbers but only reuses those that were wasted because of bureaucratic delays. Here's what they say:

House Judiciary Renews Consideration of Measures That Will Harm American Workers
FAIR Action Alert
Thanks to your calls and e-mails last week, efforts to pass four detrimental immigration-related bills stalled in the House Judiciary Committee. Unfortunately, victory was short-lived. Committee leaders remain committed to passing these bills, which would flood the workplace with hundreds of thousands of worker visas.

The Judiciary Committee is meeting again Wednesday, September 17th for another try!

Three of the four bills to be considered in Wednesday's markup amount to nothing more than gifts to big business special interests seeking to dramatically increase the stream of cheap foreign labor coming into the American workforce during these tough economic times:

• H.R. 5882 would reach back to 1992 and "recapture" employment-based and family-based visas, potentially adding over 550,000 new green cards.
• H.R. 5924 would lift the cap on employment-based visas for nurses and physical therapists until 2011.
• H.R. 6020 would grant amnesty to illegal aliens who are family members of armed forces personnel.

Anti-immigration groups go green

Readers of the Nation and other left-leaning magazines may have noticed a new addition to the usual advertisements — full-page advocacy ads by an ad hoc coalition of anti-immigration organizations.

The ads place the blame for traffic and sprawl, frequent villains for urban-oriented members of the left, on population growth, another such villain. The kicker? That population growth is blamed on immigration.

Read more at Politico.

USCIS Announces 2-Year EAD Issuance Beginning From 06/30/2008

The USCIS has announced that they will issue 2 year employment authorization cards beginning June 30, 2008. It only applies for those applicants who have filed an I-485 for adjustment of status and are expected to be in that status, waiting for a visa number for more than a year. This provides some relief for the vast number of EB-3 filers who have over half a decade long wait and had to file for an EAD every year. The cost of EAD filing was increased to $340 last July and asking people to keep paying that kind of money every year is nothing short of fleecing. What is the cost to reprint a card every year? Surely not $340! Looking at the card itself, I would be surprised if its anything more than $50. There is either a lot of inefficiency or unnecessary paperwork involved here. It would be shameful and immoral if this $340 repeat fee was used as a means to generate income for USCIS.

Visa Bulletin - July 2008

Every month around the 15th day, the U.S. Dept. of State, releases the visa bulletin which lists who can avail of a visa number next month to gain permanent residency. This bulletin breaks down the numbers based on the category and also separates out over-subscribed countries from the rest of the world. When you apply for permanent residency you get a case number and a priority date. If your priority date is earlier than the date listed in the visa bulletin for your application category, USCIS will proceed with your case and in most cases you will get your permanent resident card in a few months. Here are the cut-off dates for employment-based permanent residency categories from the July 2008 visa bulletin:

For persons born in India:

Category	Cut-off Date	Movement from previous month
EB1	Current	No change
EB2	01 Apr 2004	No change
EB3	Unavailable	Was 01 Nov 2001

For persons born in China:

Category	Cut-off Date	Movement from previous month
EB1	Current	No change
EB2	01 Apr 2004	No change
EB3	Unavailable	Was 22 Mar 2003

For persons born in Phillipines:

Category	Cut-off Date	Movement from previous month
EB1	Current	No change
EB2	Current	No change
EB3	Unavailable	Was 01 Mar 2006

For persons born in Mexico:

Category	Cut-off Date	Movement from previous month
EB1	Current	No change
EB2	Current	No change
EB3	Unavailable	Was 01 Jul 2002

For rest of the world:

Category	Cut-off Date	Movement from previous month
EB1	Current	No change
EB2	Current	No change
EB3	Unavailable	Was 01 Mar 2006

Most IT related applicants would fall under EB3. That's retrogressed by over 6 years now for applicants born in India.

Special announcement on EB-3 availability in the future:
Demand for numbers, primarily by USCIS for adjustment of status cases, will bring the entire Employment Third preference category to the annual numerical limit by the end of June. As a result, this category will become “unavailable” beginning in July and will remain so for the remainder of FY-2008. Such action will only be temporary, however, and Employment Third preference availability will return to the cut-off dates established for June in October, the first month of the new fiscal year.

NYT - The Great Immigration Panic

Today's editorial in the New York Times though not related to skilled legal immigration but to the illegal kind, talks about the mood in the US on immigration in general and acknowledges the fact that legal channels are practically closed. Some excerpts:

Someday, the country will recognize the true cost of its war on illegal immigration. The true cost is to the national identity: the sense of who we are and what we value. It will hit us once the enforcement fever breaks, when we look at what has been done and no longer recognize the country that did it.

A nation of immigrants is holding another nation of immigrants in bondage, exploiting its labor while ignoring its suffering, condemning its lawlessness while sealing off a path to living lawfully.

This is not about forcing people to go home and come back the right way. Ellis Island is closed. Legal paths are clogged or do not exist. Some backlogs are so long that they are measured in decades or generations. A bill to fix the system died a year ago this month. The current strategy, dreamed up by restrictionists and embraced by Republicans and some Democrats, is to force millions into fear and poverty.

The restrictionist message is brutally simple — that illegal immigrants deserve no rights, mercy or hope. It refuses to recognize that illegality is not an identity; it is a status that can be mended by making reparations and resuming a lawful life. Unless the nation contains its enforcement compulsion, illegal immigrants will remain forever Them and never Us, subject to whatever abusive regimes the powers of the moment may devise.

Every time this country has singled out a group of newly arrived immigrants for unjust punishment, the shame has echoed through history. Think of the Chinese and Irish, Catholics and Americans of Japanese ancestry. Children someday will study the Great Immigration Panic of the early 2000s, which harmed countless lives, wasted billions of dollars and mocked the nation’s most deeply held values.

Employment based bills not yet considered

The US Congress is back from the Memorial Day recess and many of the bills that were introduced in the house are yet to be scheduled in the calendar. With election year politics, the remaining months would polarize the vested interests further and fail to pass any legislation that could bring about relief to the skilled immigrant community. Comprehensive immigration reform advocates do not want any immigration related bills to pass until the new president is sworn in and comprehensive reform is taken up for debating. In the meantime the agony for frustrated applicants caught in the retrogressions continue.

Michelle Malkin's Immigration Rants

As one of the comments at Huffington Post said involving the Dunkin Donuts ad, "Why is malkin such a racist? I know she isn't white." to which one of the response was "The two aren't mutually exclusive. There is no such thing as reverse racism. Racism is racism." This may be true but while not all right wing whites are anti-immigrants but so far all anti-immigrants have been right wing whites. Michelle Malkin is the only exception and the reason she is given so much visibility by the right wing media is because she lends credibility to the notion that it's not just whites who oppose (illegal) immigration. Some would even call her leading a PAC "Immigrants against Immigration". It might be interesting to note that Malkin is of Phillipino heritage and as some of the very right wingers who seem to echo her would call, "an anchor baby".

I do not support illegal immigration and I certainly oppose public welfare for the illegal immigrants but I believe the US needs a whole lot of unskilled labor and needs to find a solution to the current problems to maintain their lifestyle. The reason I bring this up is because there are particular elements in the lunatic right wing who are implicitly racist by demonizing immigrants of a particular region and especially target their rants on issues involving immigrants from South America, Asia and Africa. Not many Middle Easterners immigrate to the US but they tend to club all these immigrants and their issues together in their self-feeding rants. To them being illegal or legal is a small difference that gets ignored in their rants. I believe while they may not show that they oppose legal immigration, they will do nothing to improve it but will do every thing to attack the racial aspects of illegal immigration and there by implicitly malign all immigrants with those backgrounds.

EU Blue Card Update

A while back I posted about the 'Blue card' visa program from the EU to compete for the high skilled brains of the world. I recently came across one of the best analysis of this program here. You would think what is the motivation for the EU economies for such a program considering their large native population and generally better off economies? Well, here are some reasons:

85% of unskilled labor migration goes to the EU and 5% to the US, whereas 55% of skilled labor goes to the US and only 5% to the EU.

Imagine the scenario where even 25% of the world's skilled labor goes to the EU. What would that do to the US competitiveness?

In 2007, 270,000 high-skilled Europeans emigrated to the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

So, the region is experiencing a brain drain for better options but that only leaves openings for people from the rest of the world to fill in. I have to remind the readers that the looking at the June 2008 visa bulletin, you can see how much more quicker it is for people from Europe to get US permanent residency compared to the people from over subscribed countries like India or China.

1 EUR = 1.57 USD (as of today)

If salaries were a deciding factor, this equation above fixes a lot of the disparity. (As a side note, I just heard that a bunch of European tourists with their fatter wallets have landed in Martha's Vineyard for the summer. It's cheaper for them to vacation here than in Europe.)

In times of immense competition for the world's talent, only the most competitive immigration policies will attract the best talent. The US was the preferred destination for many of these but faced with the long and difficult immigration policies of the US, many of these would opt for the easier and better rewarding options in the EU.

Development of Immigration Legislation Proposals on the Senate Side

From attorney Mathew Oh's blog

• Thus far, it is the House that has been active in introducing immigration bills, particularly the employment-based immigration bills and the Senate has remained in low keys. However, according to the AILA, there was some movement on the Senate court as part of the Emergency War Supplement Bill. AILA reports that the following bills were introduced and added to the bill in the form of amendments to the Supplement Bill in the yesterday's mark-up session of the Senate Appropriation Committee:
  • AgJobs bill, introduced by Sen. Craig and Sen. Feinstein
  • H-2B bill on 3-year returning worker extension, introduced by Sen. Mikulski
  • Bill on recapture of unused EB immigrant visas, and early adjustment filing, introduced by Sen. Gregg and Sen. Murray
  • Bill to reauthorize the EB-5 Regional Center Investment Program
• The movement in the Senate side took a strategy of attaching the immigration bills to another bill unlike the House approach to legislate the immigration bills as independent bills.

[Update: This bill passed the senate on 5/23/08 without any of the immigration related amendments fearing a veto from the White House.]