The FBI arrested two Pakistani immigration lawyers in Texas, exposing a smuggling network that imported Pakistani migrants via several forms of white-collar fraud.
The FBI investigation and the arrest follow promises by President Donald Trump’s deputies to supercharge investigations into white-collar migration crime. The Department of Justice (DOJ) reported:
Two Texas residents, Abdul Hadi Murshid, 39, and Muhammad Salman Nasir, 35, both originally from Pakistan, a law firm, and a business entity were charged by indictment with conspiracy to defraud the United States, visa fraud, money laundering conspiracy, and Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO) conspiracy, announced Acting United States Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Chad E. Meacham. Murshid and Nasir were also charged with unlawfully obtaining and attempting to obtain United States citizenship.
The defendants face up to 20 years in prison.
The federal government allows a shifting population of roughly 1.5 million migrants in white-collar jobs throughout the United States. The workers arrive via multiple white-collar visa programs, such as the H-1B work visa and the EB programs for green card applicants.
These programs create myriad incentives and opportunities for graft, scams, and fraud in the legal migration system. For decades, the government has done little to find or reduce the fraud, despite the massive damage to Americans’ white-collar professionals, per-capita productivity, and national innovation.
The programs also reduce the ability of American professionals to enforce legal, technical, and professional standards, despite the federal government’s insistence that Americans benefit from the standards, regulations, and laws set by the government.
The FBI has the opportunity to discover and penalize the two lawyers’ prior clients. They can also pressure those clients to provide evidence of additional fraud by other migrants.
The DOJ reported:
The indictment alleges that the defendants exploited the EB-2, EB-3, and H-1B visa programs. Specifically, the defendants caused classified advertisements to be placed in a daily periodical for non-existent jobs. These advertisements were placed in order to satisfy a Department of Labor (“DOL”) requirement to offer the position to United States citizens before hiring foreign nationals. Once they received the fraudulently obtained certification for from the Department of Labor, the defendants filed a petition to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”) to obtain an immigrant visa for the visa seekers.
At the time the petitions were submitted, the defendants also submitted an application for legal permanent residence so that the visa seekers could also obtain a green card. According to the indictment, to make the non-existent jobs look legitimate, the defendants received payment from visa seekers, then returned a portion of the money back to the visa seekers as purported payroll.
The H-1B program is for white-collar migrants seeking to earn green cards. The EB-2 and EB-3 programs allow companies to provide foreign workers with the huge prize of green cards and citizenship.
Trump’s deputies are promising to crack down on the airport-migrant fraud, even as they work to deport border migrants.
“We have added the following priority areas for tips: procurement and federal program fraud; trade, tariff, and customs fraud; violations of federal immigration law,” said a department official, Matthew Galeotti, chief of the department’s Criminal Division.
The new head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Andrea Lucas, has also announced more focus on visa fraud. “If you are part of the pipeline contributing to our immigration crisis or abusing our legal immigration system via illegal preferences against American workers, you must stop,” she said.
“We hope that what they do to enforce laws has teeth and leads to change,” said Dan Kotchen, at Kotchen & Low LLP, who has filed discrimination cases against major Indian-run staffing companies. He is also filing visa fraud cases via the False Claims Act, despite passivity from the federal government.
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