Joe Biden’s Deputies Smuggled Many Indian Migrants into U.S. Jobs

There is massive evidence of visa-related cheating, corruption, fraud, nepotism, bribery, and deception by Indians. “People cheat if there is an option to cheat – that’s how it works,” a former H-1B worker told Breitbart News on January 25. One problem is that India has not had time to develop a high-trust middle class, he said.

In 2022, one Indian visa worker told Breitbart News:

The embassy has become so easy, the people can just walk over them, and they will just issue the visa. It’s no big deal now. Sham marriages are no big deal. Tourist visas? People don’t even have to prove anything. They just go [answer] two questions for the sake of it. I follow [social media] groups …. where these people post their experiences from interviews, and every second interview experience [reported] that “this officer only asked me, ‘Where are you going?’ The officer only asked me, ‘Are you going on this visa?’ The people only asked me if you’re going to stay for long. ‘Okay, done. Here’s your visa.”

Garcetti boasted to his Indian audience that his embassy had “eliminated wait times for all visa types, except for first-time visitor visas, which where the wait time is down 75 percent from our peak.”

The resulting massive inflow of job-seeking Indians is rapidly displacing many young American graduates from first-rung white-collar jobs. On January 15, the Wall Street Journal reported:

Landing a professional job in the U.S. has become so tough that even Harvard Business School says its M.B.A.s can’t solely rely on the university’s name to open doors anymore.

Twenty-three percent of job-seeking Harvard M.B.A.s who graduated last spring were still looking for work three months after leaving campus. That share is up from 20% the prior year, during a cooling white-collar labor market; the figure was 10% in 2022, according to the school.

‘When I go to work, in Silicon Valley … Everyone, literally, is Indian, with a smattering of Chinese,” said a January 3 tweet by WatersofBabylon, a posted who works at a company whose products are central to the U.S. economy. He continued:

Just recently I was at a meeting of all director and above leaders for my product, and I was the only one (of about 25) who was not Indian male. Picking a random senior director of engineering at random from our corporate directory, who is Indian, he has 36 US-based employees. Of them 2 are American, 2 are Chinese, the rest Indian. All of his bosses up to the CEO are Indian. This is not an outlier. This is a typical director and I could pick virtually any in our engineering org and see the same thing. If you walk into our San Jose cafeteria at lunch time, you’d think you’d been magically transported to Bangalore. You would see almost nobody but Indians.

But Garcetti mentioned no downside to the mass export of Indians as he declared his support for H-1B workers into the United States:

What is perhaps our greatest secret weapon [is] The four-million-strong Indian diaspora that calls America home.  Every single day — because I know there’s been a lot in the news recently about them — they enrich the tapestry of America.  They fuel the vibrant connections between our two countries. Indian students [and] Indian-American immigrants are there helping run our world’s most important universities, our companies, our research entities. They’re providing innovation and a record strong tax base. They fill needs — from rural medicine [needs] that can’t be met, to small business operations that we have trouble finding employees for. This makes America, in my opinion, a better and a stronger country.

Visas

The embassy in India awards multiple categories and subcategories of visas to Indians, and it hides the scale and impact behind vague and delayed reports.

Visas for legal immigrants are a very small share of all visas in India. For example, the embassy granted just 25,633 immigrant visas in 2022 and 32,161 in 2023, partly because most immigration documents were granted to Indians already living in the United States.

But Garcetti’s deputies also granted 764,977 non-immigrant visitor visas to Indians in 2022. The number almost doubled to 1,387,940 visitor visas in 2023. That added up to 44 visitor visas for every immigrant visa from the embassy.

That huge 1.4 million nonimmigrant visas include several types of visas for non-immigrant temporary workers. For example, the embassy approved 429,987 multi-year H, L, and J work visas for white-collar workers — such as H-1Bs — and their working spouses. That 2023 work visa number is up from 291,532 in 2019.

The visitors also included 134,888 F-1 student visas. Those visas can be immediately redeemed for work permits lasting up to four years. The F-1 visas awarded by President George W Bush’s low-tax Optional Practical Training and Curricular Practical Training programs. The inflow of Indian F-1 visas rose by another 23 percent in 2024, to roughly 170,000 — or 500,000 workers/students every three years.

But Garcetti’s biggest growth was in the combined B-1/B-2 visas for tourists and business visitors, for example, Indian white-collar workers who say they plan to attend an industry conference or a training course.

B-1/B-2 Visas 

Those B-1/B-2 visas are being used by many Indians to legally enter for illegal work, say Palmer, media reports, and federal documents.

Garcetti’s deputies issued 735,401 B-1/B-2 visas in 2023, or almost triple the 264,515 B-1/B-2 visas issued in 2022. The 2024 number is likely to be even higher. 

The Indian B-1/B-2 number is three times the 267,027 B-1/B-2 visas issued to Chinese travelers in 2023.

The visas typically last for 10 years and can be used for six-month stays, regardless of the person’s skills or income. They are not work permits — but they are routinely used by migrants to take white-collar and blue-collar jobs in the United States. 

The Department of State provides very little information about the Indians’ use of the B-1/B-2 visa. For example, it does not show how many are the elderly parents of Indian visa workers, nor how many working-age Indians repeatedly extend their temporary visas. 

But there is much evidence that the B-1/B-2 visas are used by Indians with E-2 franchise visas to import store clerks and hotel maids, and by Indian professionals to import low-caste servants. The B-1/B-2 visas are also used by Indian graduates who want to find gig-worker subcontract jobs for Fortune 500 firms, and by Indian-run employers that want very cheap white-collar workers.

Palmer described the process for the white-collar migrants:

Once the B-1 arrives [at the Indian-run subcontractors’ office in the United States], they go to the client [customer] site. The [client] company changes the contracts from “Time and Material” to fixed price, and the client pays [the Indian subcontractor] in U.S. dollars and then the worker is paid [by the Indian subcontractor] in money in India .. [without] paying taxes, federal or city.

…

After six months, the people who are working for [subcontractor] staffing agencies, they’ll just go down to Mexico, or they’ll fly out to Canada, and they’ll get their [six-month] visa restamped. And they do it every six months for 10 years!

The B-1/B-2 workers are also imported to help finish contracts on time, sometimes by mid-level managers without the formal approval of top managers, the former visa worker said. “They don’t get paid [American] salary, but an allowance just for the additional expenses on a per-day basis,” he added.

The federal government shows very little interest in stopping this labor smuggling.

In 2013, the U.S. government levied a minor $34 million fine on Infosys Ltd., a leading, Indian-dominated white-collar staffing company, after it was caught using Indian B-1 visitors as workers. Other Indian companies have been hit by recent taxpayer lawsuits for allegedly hiring cheaper B-1s instead of H-1B workers.

“This is what the B-1/B-2 visa does,” Palmer said. “It’s too easy to defraud … it’s unbelievable.”

Garcetti’s expansion of the B-1/B-2 visa echoes the “humanitarian parole” excuse used on the U.S. southern border. For example, President Joe Biden’s border czar, Alejandro Mayorkas, imported 1.5 million “inadmissible” people via a “humanitarian parole” loophole in the southern border. Mayorkas justified his inflow by saying U.S. companies “need” foreign workers, regardless of the wage-cutting damage to ordinary Americans. 

In March 2023, U.S. officials in Washington helped the B-1/B-2 migration by allowing Indians with B-1/B-2 visas to travel to the United States to apply and interview for jobs.  And on January 17, January 2025, Garcetti opened a new consulate to help distribute more visas. 

H-1Bs and H4s

The three-year H-1B visa program is increasingly well-known, in part, because President Donald Trump has distanced himself from his widely-praised 2020 reforms of the white-collar outsourcing program. Trump’s 202o reforms were blocked by Mayorkas.

The federal government has repeatedly expanded the H-1B program since it was created in 1990. In 200o, they were allowed to stay in the U.S. once they were approved to get a green card. In 2015, President Barack Obama granted work permits — Employment Authorization Documents — to the H4-visa spouses.

The federal government releases very little about this disastrous — and strategically counterproductive — giveaway of at least 3 million foreign workers to CEOs and investors.

India has been the largest user of the program.

The U.S. embassy has reported it approved or renewed three-year visas for 659,753 H-1B workers, spouses, and children from 2022 and 2023. That number suggests the overall Indian H visa population in the United States is up to 900,000 people — or at least 400,000 Indian H-1Bs and 150,000 H4 working spouses. 

The embassy’s numbers suggest that the U.S. government’s 2019 census of 583,000 H-1B workers from all countries may understate the resident visa-worker population.

Many Indian H-1B workers return home after a few years, usually to recreate their temporary U.S. worksites in India. Much of India’s economy now consists of former H-1Bs who operate back-office and tech-support jobs for U.S. Fortune 500 companies.

But many of India’s H-1B workers stay in the United States for many years, nearly always in jobs that would otherwise have gone to better-paid U.S. graduates.

Worse, a rising number of former Indian H-1B workers have been promoted by U.S. investors to CEO and C-Suite jobs. Their growing influence is helping the Indian government to transfer more jobs and technology investment from the U.S. to India. For example, Microsoft’s CEO, Indian-born Satya Nadella is laying off Americans in multiple departments, including computer security. But “not in India,” Puneet Chandok, president of Microsoft India and South Asia, told TheHinduBusinessline.com. “In fact, for all of India, more jobs are being created,” he said on January 12.

Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, is also a former visa worker, and he is moving more jobs and high-end research from the United States to India.

U.S. officials, including Garcetti’s State Department, are helping and celebrating this transfer of wealth and power from the U.S. to India.

For example, the department recently said it plans to let H-1Bs get their three-year visas renewed — “stamped” — in the United States. This will mean the huge population of H-1Bs in the United States does not have to return to India to get their H-1B visas extended.

Since 2021, Mayorkas has taken multiple steps to allow more H-1B migrants and to reduce anti-fraud checks.

L-1 Visas 

Multinational companies can use L-1 visas to move their employees to different countries. The duration of the visas depends on the nation, but Indians are allowed lengthy stays of five or seven years.

This means Indian companies can move many Indian graduates into their U.S. offices to perform work in the United States. For example, Indian-run staffing firms transfer Indian software graduates to their U.S. offices for Fortune 500 subcontracting jobs that would otherwise go to U.S. graduates.

The visa also serves as a company benefit for employees because top managers can nominate favored workers for L-1A visas, which puts those workers on a fast track to the bonanza prize of a green card.

U.S. embassy counselors can deny visas to the workers. However, the rejection rates have declined under Biden, and favored companies can get “Blanket L-1” visa approval for many of their employees.

The generous provision given to India makes the L-1 visa a huge but little-known pipeline for Indian companies to move staff and claimed executives into the U.S. labor force.

From 2019 to 2023, the U.S. embassy in India approved L visas for 176,006 people, including the children and working spouses of the L-1 workers. This suggests that the U.S. embassy has used the program to expand the Indian workforce in the United States by another 120,000 Indian migrants, regardless of suspected corporate discrimination against American professionals.

J-1 Visas and O-1 Visas

The J-1 visa program is run by the Department of State. The program has many sub-programs that import roughly 80,000 white-collar workers for a wide variety of jobs — such as laboratory scientist — that otherwise would go to young Americans.

However, agency data shows that relatively few Indian workers use the program — maybe 30,000.

Mayorkas widened the J-1 visa program to encourage more corporate hiring of technology graduates and to encourage J-1 workers to stay for several additional years.

Indian experts and their family members also got 2,534 0-1 “genius visas” in 2023. That number is twice as many as were given to South Korean experts. In 2023 and January 2025, Mayorkas eased the rules for granting 0-1 visas to “Nonimmigrants of Extraordinary Ability.”

TN and E-2 Visas

Roughly 2 million Indians were invited to live in Canada by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The civic and economic damage of this invite forced his humiliating resignation in early January. Many of his Indians are getting Canadian citizenship, which means that increasing numbers of Indian-born college graduates can move into the United States via the TN visa created by the NAFTA deal.

The Department of Homeland Security does not track how many Indians use TN visas to get jobs in the United States.

Indians from Canada also use the E-2 visa to buy into U.S. franchise businesses, such as hotels and Seven-11 stores. Once in the United States, the Indian franchise holders face intense pressure to import very cheap Indian workers via the B-1/B-2 loophole.

“I can’t compete with the [local] warehouses for wages,” one Indian hotel owner told the Washington Post in December 2021. “The government should let us get people from India, even just for six months,” Hasit Patel said. “There are certain job categories that American people don’t want to do anymore,” he complained after his American employees quit to take better-paying jobs at nearby employers.

The Indians’ use of the E-2 visa has produced a nationwide archipelago of Indian-run franchise businesses that pay very low wages. These little islands of Indian-style economics reduce tax revenues and consumer spending in small towns, and they also make it difficult for American small businesses to pay normal wages to Americans.

Student F-1 Visas

Indians can get F-1 visas — and work permits — by enrolling in U.S. universities.

The work permits are granted via the “Curricular Practical Training” and “Optional Practical Training” programs, which were created by deputies for President George H. Bush, without any approval from Congress.

Garcetti boasted:

A flagship program of our nation is optional practical training, which nearly 100,000 Indian students are now engaged with in the United States, allowing them to stay in the United States to gain a specific industry and research experience, to build a stronger workforce for both America and for India.

That tuition-for-jobs trade is a goldmine for revenue-maximizing U.S. universities — so Garcetti pitches U.S. university seats to Indian students:

“In 2024, India became the top sender of international students to the US for the first time since the 2008-09 academic year, with more than 331,000 students studying in American institutions,” the HindustanTimes.com said in its January 13 report on Garcetti’s speech.

The tuition-for-jobs swap is a $40 billion windfall for U.S. universities because the Indians pay out-of-state tuition rates.

The program is protected by major lobbies in the United States, including FWD.us and its ally, the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, which have a shared interest in maximizing the foreign supply of white-collar workers into Fortune 500 jobs. Each year, roughly 25,000 Indian F-1 migrants become H-1B migrants.

FWD.us is the leading pro-migration lobby in the United States. It was formed by West Coast consumer economy investors to help pass the failed 12013 amnesty bill.

Under Mayorkas’ directions, officials reduced protections for American graduates, tolerated Indian discrimination against American graduates, blocked a lawsuit against the OPT program, and expanded the number of college courses that provide three-year work permits.

“I kind of get the feeling that Indians love Americans, and Americans love Indians, don’t you think? ” Garcetti told his Indian audience.

Illegal Migration

The obvious success of legal Indian migrants to the United States is causing more illegal Indian migration to the United States. In February 2024, Reuters reported:

In Sumit Bhanwala’s village in northern India, pictures of the Statue of Liberty adorn facades and tractors display stars and stripes bumper stickers – a way to let neighbours know that sons, brothers and nephews have made it to the United States.

For 25-year-old Bhanwala, the images are a source of inspiration as he prepares for an arduous, months-long journey to sneak across the U.S. border – an odyssey that will cost his family tens of thousands of dollars in fees to people smugglers. “America is the solution. Look around you,” he said, pointing out the modern multistorey houses that have sprung up in the village in Haryana state thanks to remittances sent from migrants already overseas.

Bhanwala is a political science graduate who might be tempted to organize for political reform of India’s government and society. But he will not be a political threat to India’s government if he is exported to a Seven-11 graveyard shift on the Jersey Turnpike, alongside many other young men from Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

Reuters described how the Indian illegals find work in the U.S. underground economy, which includes a growing number of Indian-owned companies:

Families said their sons and nephews sent at least 200,000 rupees home every month, mainly doing a mix of full- and part-time jobs at gas stations, malls, grocery stores and restaurants. “He makes about $100 a day at a dairy farm in California. He made 6,000 rupees ($72) in a month doing the same job here,” said Suresh Kumar, 45, referring to his nephew who left in November 2022 and reached the United States in April 2023.

In fiscal 2020, 20,000 Indian migrants were detained at the borders. Under Biden, the inflow rose to 240,000 for the 2022-24 period.

The inflow bumped up India’s illegal migrant population to roughly 900,000.

The Indian government has generally refused to accept the return of illegal migrants, and Mayorkas did not want to detain them — as required by federal law — so he released them to compete for the jobs, wages, and housing needed by ordinary American voters.

Lobbies for More Migration

There are several explanations for the quality of Garcetti’s exit speech.

He may have wished to pander to Indian officials before getting a well-paid lobby job for the business groups that want more trade with India.

His bosses favored more migration, regardless of the harm to Americans. On January 6, for example, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan announced a deal that touted technology transfer to India and discreetly admitted the tuition-for-visas trade that is so lucrative for U.S. universities:

Celebrating steps that expand of the ability of top AI scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs from India to come to the United States, including rulemaking that modernized the U.S. H-1B application process, recent clarifications of the rules for O-1 visas and other visa categories, and other efforts that have streamlined visa processing;

Garcetti’s direct boss, Secretary of State Antony Blinken also worked with Mayorkas to accelerate migration. For example, the two deputies worked with foreign leaders to create a “Safe Mobility Initiative” to smuggle many migrants from the global south up to jobs in the United States and Europe. Biden’s officials tried to hide the program under obscure language and sub-agency directives, but it was quickly killed by Trump’s deputies, including Marco Rubio.

Also, many business lobbies and legislators have pushed the White House and Congress to trade U.S. white-collar jobs to Indians in exchange for India buying energy, commodities, and services for India’s low-tech, resource-poor economy.

Exporting surplus labor is a core economic strategy for India, which has negotiated deals to export Indian labor to Australia, Germany, and the United Kingdom. It is also trying to export Indians to Canada, Ireland, and the European Union. Many more Indians work in the Arab states along the Persian Gulf.

“We will be the provider of the workforce of the world in about 15 years, after 2035,” Ani Agnihotri, program chair of the USA-India Business Summit told an Arkansas reporter in 2019.

Indian migrants in the U.S. sent roughly $120 billion back to India in 2024, so boosting the economy by roughly 3.4 percent. The remittances also help the government buy what it wants, such as defense-industry drones and Boeing’s passenger aircraft.

India’s government also demands cooperation from U.S. companies who want to grow their business in India, such as Tesla. Unsurprisingly, Musk loudly defended India’s H-1B export during an online debate over Christmas.

India’s elected government is also under constant political pressure to find jobs for its vast population of 1,500 million people. Roughly speaking, there are twenty million males and females for every age below 30 in the very poor country. Roughly 2 million Indians graduate each year with degrees in engineering or software, mostly from low-quality universities.

“Some people called it a brain drain, but that is not really true because India has enough brains but they are unable to use them,” said the former visa worker. “[Workers] going out and doing better [via legal migration] eventually brings back some knowledge or some finances [to India] —  it does help, definitely, as a country.”

Labor Negotiations

The predatory dumping of excess labor justifies India’s political claim to be a “human resource power,” just as China is a manufacturing power and the United States is a services power.

But India’s labor dumping is very destructive for ordinary people in the destination countries whose wages stall and housing costs escalate as desperate Indians flood into their societies.

“The [Indian government is] ruthless because they are acting in their own self-interest,” said Vaughan. “You can’t blame them — the problem is with our system and our unwillingness to impose limits and guardrails and protections for Americans.”

Trump won the 2024 election because Americans oppose the establishment‘s unacknowledged economic policy of “Extraction Migration” which inflicts huge pocketbook costs on ordinary Americans.

The American public does not want their wages cut, their housing costs raised, and their workplaces denied productivity investments. Nor do they want their limited civic assets to be overloaded, their personal security eroded, and their civic society distracted by diverse voices and foreign demands for the benefit of wealthy investors.

The Indian government is now trying to persuade Trump to not sharply reduce Indian migration to the United States.

On January 21, Bloomberg News reported that Indian officials suddenly agreed to accept the repatriation of 18,000 Indian illegal migrants — even as they presented their offer as part of a negotiation to expand Indian migration:

“As part of India-US cooperation on migration and mobility, both sides are engaged in a process to deter illegal migration,” Randhir Jaiswal, a spokesperson for India’s Ministry of External Affairs, told Bloomberg. “This is being done to create more avenues for legal migration from India to the US.”

On his first full day in office, Rubio met with India’s external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, who told Indian reporters “We want Indian talent and Indian skills to have the maximum opportunity at the global level,”

He added:

I also flagged some concerns which are very widespread in India about delays in visas. And you know the relationship is not well-served if it takes that many days for peole to get a visa. Ultimately those visa delays do impact business, they do affect tourism… They in many ways constrain the people-to-people interaction, which is the foundation of our relationship.

As yet, there is no Capitol Hill Caucus or powerful citizens’ lobby to fight against the backroom trade of Americans’ white-collar and blue-collar jobs to India’s huge population of desperate and poor graduates.

Several groups, such as U.S. Tech Workers, are trying to fill the gap.

Rubio, however, seems eager to defend Americans from the influential lobbies who profit by inflating America’s economy with cheap foreign labor, apartment-sharing renters, and welfare-funded consumers. “We’re going to have to do something dramatic” about migration, a combative Rubio told NBC in September 2024:

Rubio’s formal statement about the January 22 meeting with Indian officials also included some subtle diplomatic drama.

His agency’s post-meeting statement ignored the Indians’ push for more legal migration, and instead noted that “Secretary Rubio also emphasized the Trump Administration’s desire to work with India to advance economic ties and address concerns related to irregular migration.”

And unlike Garcetti, Rubio did try to dance the “Bhangra beat” when he met the Indian officials.