Within our immigration system there are three negatives to avoid:
- Bad public policy;
- Fraud against the United States and its citizens; and
- Fraud against individual aliens.
One often encounters a single negative, such as someone seeking to enter the United States with bad documents; he would be in Class B.
Then there are two-fers, in which there is both bad policy (such as granting visas to unskilled or semi-skilled workers in the "needed worker" category) and the issuance of a visa on behalf of a specific worker who does not qualify for it (e.g., one who has never worked in the trade claimed). Here we have both Classes A and B in play.
But the truly glorious bad examples (when A, B, and C all combine in the same case) are most likely to be found in the EB-5 immigrant investor and the H-1B programs. They are the reverse of the "hat trick" in hockey, three goals in one game by one player.
My sense is that both the EB-5 program and the H-1B programs constitute bad public policy. We should not be selling batches of green cards to alien families that have little but $500,000 in cash to offer this country, nor should we aggravate unemployment rates among U.S. college graduates by bringing in needless (but cheap and docile) alien high-tech workers.
A recent example of the negative hat trick in the EB-5 program came in Chicago, when a pair of would-be developers lied to USCIS (and to the would-be investors) about a hotel complex to be built near O'Hare, scooping up $11 million from the alien investors before they were stopped by the Securities and Exchange Commission, as reported in an earlier blog.
Similarly, an Indian body shop, operating within the all-too-loose environment of the H-1B program, broke faith with federal authorities when it failed to pay its H-1B workers when they were temporarily "benched", thus breaking federal law and exploiting the aliens (while indirectly steering jobs away from American workers). This hat trick was covered in another blog.
While it is always useful to report the too-common link between certain parts of the immigration system and fraud, media reporting on these incidents present a double-edged sword in the immigration policy debate.
Too often the mighty users of such programs, such as Microsoft (H-1B) seize upon these lapses to divert the conversation away from the main topic — the bad public policy — to stress the need for anti-fraud efforts, rather than the abolition (or the serious reduction) of the underlying programs.
Fraud, particularly fraud neatly summarized in federal indictments, is a much more tempting topic for reporters than an examination of a nominally legal program that indirectly hurts American workers, like the H-1B program. This is most true in the EB-5 program where the underlying damage to American systems is even harder to describe than the U.S. workers displaced by the H-1B program.
So we hear about fraud with some degree of regularity, but we rarely learn about the less dramatic, and more fundamental failings of these same programs.