Governments Offer Grants to Employers for Jobs, But H-1Bs Get Them

By David North on June 15, 2016

Here's a story about how H-1B employers rip off state and federal agencies by using grants and other programs designed to create jobs for residents to instead create jobs for H-1B workers.

And the story is not coming to us from big media, but from smaller papers like the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer and the Danville (Va.) Register Bee.

According to the Observer's Deon Roberts:

As more companies turn to H-1B visa workers, North Carolina taxpayers are helping to foot the bill.

Among those applying to use the visa workers are companies that have been awarded millions of dollars in state grants under agreements to create jobs in Charlotte and elsewhere.

And it's legal for those companies to meet their job-creation requirements with foreign workers according to the North Carolina Department of Commerce.

Note the use of the bland term "visa workers".

State governments (and to a minor degree the feds) offer grants, guaranteed loans, and government contracting preferences to corporations who say they will produce new and additional jobs in particular areas, with a wide variety of different approaches and definitions.

The North Carolina program — and you can congratulate some unknown lobbyists for this — does not mention temporary alien workers in the underlying law, so the corporations say that they deserve the subsidies and they have convinced the GOP state administration that this is appropriate.

As a result, HCL Technologies, an IT services (i.e. outsourcing) firm headquartered in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, was awarded $19 million in state grants in 2014 to expand its hiring in Wake County (Raleigh), N.C. It then turned around and filed more than 2,000 applications for H-1Bs to work in the state.

HCL is listed by an industry website, Myvisajobs, as the seventh-largest user of H-1B nonimmigrant workers in the country. The Indian outsourcing companies, as we have reported earlier, are de facto exempt from anti-discrimination laws, and routinely ignore American talent to hire employees from India, and, for the most part, young Indian males. HCL's hiring batting average is even more exclusionary than that of other, similar firms: 99.4 percent of their H-1B hires are fellow Indians.

The Observer also reported that another employer, the New Jersey-based Spectra Group, secured an N.C. grant for $2.9 million and then started hiring H-1Bs.

Meanwhile, let's consider depressed Danville, Va., a former furniture manufacturing town that sits just above the North Carolina-Virginia border. We reported earlier that a small-scale Indian outsourcing firm with a tie to Danville, and run by the indicted Raju Kasuri and his wife, was hauled into court for breaking the immigration laws and illicitly exploiting a large number of H-1 B workers.

Kasuri managed to use Danville's down-at-the-heels status to get a subsidized loan and a small federal contract from the U.S. Small Business Administration's Historically Underutilized Business Zones program. He also secured a $500,000 grant from Virginia's Tobacco Commission, which encourages economic development in Southside Virginia, but later he had to return the money, with $75,000 still owing.

So whether it is a global giant or a mom-and-pop conspiracy, H-1B employers of all sizes are taking advantage of government programs designed to help the resident unemployed.