Pow! Bam! Sock! Vermonters Again Collect Swiftly in Migration Fraud Case

Maybe it’s in the milk they drink, but yet again we have a case of Vermonters moving swiftly to collect cash for prior immigration violations.

We reported recently that the State of Vermont had sued Raymond James, the brokerage firm, for its part in the recently revealed EB-5 disaster, and had collected, in a matter of a few weeks, nearly $6 million of the $24 million or so that had been lost.

Now, on a totally different front, we have the U.S. Attorney for Vermont announcing that it had completed collecting a forfeiture of one million dollars from a New York couple, Loreto and Hazel Kudera, for their once-successful H-1B swindle.

It is a Vermont case because the Kuderas were defrauding, among others, the Vermont Service Center, one of the USCIS’s remote decision factories, where applications are adjudicated. In this case, the first document was filed in federal court on April 15; then, in short order, there was a plea agreement involving the forfeiture of one million dollars in ill-gotten gains, and on June 30 the announcement that the final tranche had been paid. Sentencing is to follow.

Usually courts and prosecutors move much more slowly than this.

The H-1B scam is not the first of its kind. It involved always available, and usually docile, nurses from the Philippines. Since, nurses, per se, are not eligible for H-1B visas, applications for them must be dressed up on fraudulent clothes, claiming that they will have more specialized duties, such as, for instance, those of a clinical coordinator or health care quality manager. Such job titles go with substantial paychecks.

In reality, however, the nurses were employed as regular nurses, were paid much less than the documents promised, and had to pay (which is illegal) fees to the Kuderas, as did the nursing homes where the nurses worked. The Kuderas did this 100 times until they were caught (in a manner not described) and collected a substantial amount of money in the process.

We previously reported a somewhat similar scheme, in which the conspirators had invented a whole university, and kept filing applications – again for Filipino nurses – to fill teaching jobs at the non-existent nursing school of the non-existent university. The nurses then filled regular nursing jobs at nursing homes and paid a continuing series of bribes to the conspirators so that the latter would not report them as being out of status. This went on for years. Had some fed spent an hour on a site visit, the scheme would have collapsed.

The moral of the story would seem to be if there is a steady flow of applications for specialist nursing jobs, with the workers coming from the Philippines, look twice before you rubber stamp that application.