For decades, the H-1B visa program has been the cornerstone of the high-skilled U.S. immigration system. To its advocates, it is a vital pipeline that brings talented workers from around the world to power the U.S. economy. But to its critics, it is a system rife with abuses, one that can undermine American workers while also trapping foreign workers in exploitative arrangements.
A new book, titled Wild Wild East: Exiled Americans, Enslaved Indians, and the Systematic Abuse of the H-1B Visa Program, takes readers into a particularly obscure corner of this world: the world of so-called “desi counseling.” These companies – also known as H-1Bs – connect Indian tech workers with US employers through a maze of recruiters, subcontractors, universities and corporate clients.
The book’s author, Tanul Thakur, discussed his disturbing account of Indian H-1B visa seekers, displaced American tech workers, and companies that profit from a deeply broken system, on a recent episode of Grand Tamasha, a weekly radio show co-produced by Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Thakur is an award-winning journalist and film critic. In 2015, he won the National Film Award for Best Film Critic, the youngest critic ever to receive the honor.
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What is Desi Consultations?
“Desi consulting companies often lie to technology workers in India that they have a job in the United States,” Thakur explained, recounting his first-hand experience with one of these companies when he was looking for a job after completing his university studies in the United States. “Only when the workers reach the United States do they discover that they have been lied to and smuggled from India to the United States.”
Thakur described the world of medical consulting as “really dark.” Such companies engage in “large-scale wage theft and psychological devastation at a level that still makes me shudder,” he said. “Payment is often late. There are threats of deportation and legal intimidation. Because you are beholden to your visa sponsor or employer… you often don’t protest these working conditions. You start living a double life. At work, you lied and said you had seven years of experience. Then you come home and have to talk to someone on Skype or Webex to get your work done.”
Thakur said that the exploitation committed by these companies is an open secret, but the US authorities have not taken sufficiently strict measures against them. “American companies benefit, and they have a disproportionate amount of influence in keeping the H-1B program the way it is,” he explained. “This is followed by the Department of Labor’s laxity in detecting and punishing the corrupt. Even when companies are barred from the H-1B program, which is rare, they often open companies under a false name and continue the same process.”
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Thakur proposed several reforms to close loopholes in the H-1B scheme. “The H-1B program has long been used as a tool for cheap labor,” he said. “American companies say they use H-1B workers because they are the best and brightest, and it speaks to a STEM crisis that cannot be met by the local market. However, these same companies often pay wages well below the average local wage.”
