In one corner, we have an Indian national who secured a master’s degree at an American university and who worked as an OPT foreign worker whose employer fraudulently charged him a training fee. He is Siddhartha Venkata.
In the other corner, we have a major user of foreign workers (OPT and H-1B), which the worker contends charged the fee several years ago. That is Integra Technologies.
In a recent court filing, Venkata said that he had been forced to leave this country and then denied an H-1B petition by the State Department because of his previous relationship with Integra.
Meanwhile, Integra was rewarded by the Labor Department with 233 H-1B labor certifications, and can expect to be allowed to hire 70-80 or so of them as a result of the most recent lottery.
Venkata, not surprisingly, regarded these developments as unfair, and he and others similarly situated sued in federal court to get H-1B visas according to recent report by Bloomberg News. The headline tells it all: “Indian Grads Sue Over H-1B Denials Based on Employers’ Fraud”.
We reported the scandal at the time, but mistakenly said then that Integra Technologies had gone out of business.
We might know more about the case if it had not been filed so recently (August 10). In many such cases the key document, the complaint, is sealed, often to be opened up a few days later. In this case it has not yet been unsealed. The Pacer number for the case is 2:23-cv-01227.