by jmyeet | 2025-09-19 22:09:08+00:00
I've been through this immigration system. It's capricious, arbitrary and Kafkaesque.

It is absolutely clear that there is H1B abuse and I'm looking directly at the bodyshops like Infosys and Tata. Here's how it goes:

1. Apply for as many visas as possible. This is done primarily for Indian nationals for reasons which will become clear;

2. As the employer you really don't care which ones are approved or how many because what you're going to do is farm out those employees, whether there's 1000 of them or 10,000 of them;

3. Because there is an annual quota and applications have expanded so much, the chance of success is about 1 in 3 currently in the annual lottery. And a Principal Engineer in AI at Google or Meta has the same chance of success as a junior developer at Tata. There may be other options for the first person such as EB1 or NIW or L1 but that's really beyond the scope;

4. As part of this process you have to "prove" you cannot fill a position with a US resident or citizen. There is a whole process for this to minimize the number of applicants and to reject any who happen to find your newspaper ad and apply. This also applies to the Green card Labor Certification too, to a higher degree. Part of this is to make sure the employee is getting paid enough for their job and area. This is called a prevailing wage determination ("PWD"). This process doens't really work, which I'll get into later;

5. So you, as an Indian national won the H1B lottery and your visa is approved. You come to the US and hope Tata finds you a job where they farm you out at $200-500 per hours while paying you $50 or thereabouts;

6. Now the employer starts doing things they're technically not allowed to do, like if they can't find you a job they stop paying you. You may fall below the PWD because of this;

7. A H1B is valid for 3 years, extendable by another 3 for a total of 6 years, after which you're technically meant to leave the country. But what happens is the employer will file for an employment-based green card for you. If they do this in the first 5 years you can remain while that case is pending;

8. There are annual quotas for how many green cards are issued for each employment category. Additionally no more than 7% each year can be issued to any single country, based entirely on your country of birth, not your actual citizenship. And if you're married and have children under age, they will also count against these quotas.

9. So because H1B applicants are disproportionately Indian natioanals, there is a MASSIVE bottleneck for employment based green cards. As such, there is a HUGE backlog. Currently, USCIS is processing green cards for EB3 applicants from India who have a priority date of August 2013. That means their PERM was approved on or before August 2013;

10. So this is how these bodyshops can abuse Indian nationals. Those nationals really can't leave their job. Not easily anywway. There are laws that if they change jobs they get to keep their priority date but the new employer has to file an entirely new green card applications, including doing the entire PERM process again. Oh and if the employer moves area or their jobs changes significantly, it may invalidate their PERM too.

So these bodyshops can keep essentially indentured servants for 15-20+ years and at any time can fire that person. The power imbalance is so massive. This suppresses wages for everyone.

And these people are in the same cateogry as highly paid engineers in tech companies who have substantially better conditions.

Also, at any point along the way the USCIS can simply decide to take a whole bunch of extra time for literally no reason. They have a policy to randomly audit ~30% of applications. Why? They will never tell you. Their arguemnt is to avoid people "gaming" the system by working out the audit criteria so there's a bunch of random "noise" in there. Literally.

Well that doesn't sound bad right? Extra scrutiny? Except now you've added 1-2 years to the processing for literally no reason. You may get a request for evidence ("RFE") out of it too, which might add another year too. This can go multiple rounds too. I know people who spent 5 years going through audits and RFEs. One in particular is an engineering director at Google now.

While tech companies like Google, Meta, etc are better than the bodyshops they absolutely use this system to suppress wages, again because of the power imbalance.

It doesn't have to be this way. Take Switzerland as an example. I'm rusty on the details but IIRC if you're on a B permit (work permit like an H1B, tied to an employer) for 5 or 10 years (EU citizen is 5, otherwise 10, generally), you automatically get a C permit, which is basically a green card.

All this to say is that I have mixed feelings on this $100k fee. It will absolutely cut demand for H1Bs. It will decimate new graduate H1Bs but there's an argument that US residents and citizens should get priority for entry-level positions anyway, right?

If all this comes with much less paperwork, like skipping the whole LC process, then maybe large employers will pay it because they absolutely do spend a fortune on immigration lawyers.

If anything, the entire immigration system needs an overhaul but there's no political will for that. There are no votes in it. Quite the opposite: any serious attempt can be dismissed as "they're stealing our jobs".

I also think layoffs at large companies should absolutely preclude you from sponsoring H1Bs entirely for 2+ years.