The Worst H-1B Employers, According to the Labor Department

David North is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. He has been studying various migration streams, both of immigrants and nonimmigrants, off and on since 1969. He is grateful for the research assistance of Cody Donald, a CIS intern.

The Center for Immigration Studies, as a public service, has pulled together a comprehensive, all-time list of Department of Labor-debarred H-1B employers.

To our knowledge, this is the only complete listing in existence; it is displayed in alphabetical order so that job seekers can be warned about seeking employment with outfits that have received black marks from the department. Existing lists tend to be fragmented in various ways.

The H-1B program is one that allows, in general terms, U.S. employers to hire nonimmigrant foreign workers, usually (but not always) into high-tech positions, at wages lower than those that would be paid otherwise. Thus all users of the program are at least nibbling away at labor standards, and are involved with denying jobs to available professionals who are citizens or green card holders.

Within the universe of H-1B users there is a much smaller population whose treatment of their workers, or the immigration law, was so abusive as to secure negative attention from the normally sleepy Labor Department. These employers fall into two categories: the broader debarred list, and the worst of the worst, the "willful violators" whose names appear in boldface type on the CIS list.

The Labor Department's standards are such that no more than one-tenth of 1 percent of the H-1B-using firms wind up on these lists. There are many terrible employers who are not on these lists.

The list covers all known DoL debarment and willful violator rulings; some of the firms listed have since gone out of business; others have changed their names, been absorbed by other firms, or changed their addresses. Some have perhaps changed their labor practices, but there are no data on that. All the listings are frozen in time, carrying the names and the addresses at the time of the DoL rulings.

The list that follows is based solely on DoL rulings. Negative governmental moves by other units of government, or the courts, against other H-1B users, such as the often-in-trouble Infosys (as my colleague, John Miano, had reported earlier), are not included in this listing.

Most of the employers listed are in the IT field; there is, however, one public school system that had mishandled the H-1B program outrageously. It is that of Prince George's County (Md.), as discussed in an earlier blog.

I am grateful to Cody Donald, a CIS intern, for his research assistance.

Sources: All employers on the list have been debarred at some point by the U.S. Department of Labor for the way they treated their workers. More specifically CIS combined the two debarred lists currently on the DoL website (here and here), historical lists found on MyVisaJob.Com (here and here), and lists found on archived records of the U.S. Department of Labor website dating back to 12/25/2009. The most recent DoL lists used in this compendium are noted as effective as of December 15, 2014.

* Address or addresses as shown in the original document.