Indian Staffing Firm Cloudgen is Involved in Visa Fraud

Indian Staffing Firm Cloudgen is Involved in Visa Fraud

by Jose Nino
Jul 1, 2021

Immigration watchdog organization U.S. Tech Workers exposed earlier this month a visa fraud scheme involving the Indian IT staffing firm Cloudgen.

Kevin Lynn, the founder of U.S. Tech Workers, published a post titled “Big Tech Green Card Giveaway Bill is Back!” where he highlighted a case where an Indian IT staffing firm plead guilty to H1-B fraud. Lynn noted that “not a single American media outlet covered the story” and that one had to “follow Indian media outlets to come across stories like this.”

Lynn broke down an activist’s findings about Cloudgen’s visa fraud:

The company admitted to recruiting multiple information technology workers from India and falsely procuring H-1B visas for them to enter and work in the U.S.

In this bait and switch scheme, the company would file documents with the Departments of Labor (DOL) and Homeland Security (DHS) containing fraudulent statements about the availability of work at third-party national employers.

Cloudgen would then submit forged contracts stating each third-party company had a job for the individual Indian national. Next, based on those false documents, Cloudgen would submit paperwork to get an H-1B worker’s visa for the Indian national.

However, because the jobs were fake, they were housed in different locations across the country while Cloudgen obtained other employment for them.

Cloudgen took a percentage of the worker’s salary as their fees, earning approximately $493,516 in profits during the course of the conspiracy.”

For those in the IT industry, this is nothing new. This is not a one-off incident, rather it is all too typical and U.S. tech workers are familiar with how these Indian IT staffing firms exploit the H-1B visa program to create fat profits for themselves. Cloudgen’s problem is it got sloppy, and as a result, got caught. If it were more widely reported on in the United States and Europe it would expose how the system is being gamed. There are thousands of Cloudgen companies out there getting away with fraud.

Legal migration does not get much coverage in the U.S. largely due to the corporate domination of the immigration debate. Big business loves cheap labor and countries like India are a popular source for this kind of labor.

BLP reported on a prior occasion how the recent introduction of the EAGLE Act, a bill that Preston Huennekens, the Government Relations Manager at the Federation of American Immigration Reform, described as “a bill that would eliminate per-country caps for immigrant visas and subsequently ensure that only Indian and Chinese nationals dominate immigration into the United States for the foreseeable future.” This is a clear handout to big business, who’s always thirsting for cheap labor.

There comes a time to move beyond generic libertarian shibboleths and start standing up for the nation. America is a nation, not a shopping mall. Any America First patriot would be calling for an immigration moratorium to protect American workers and deny corporations more streams of cheap foreign labor.

https://bigleaguepolitics.com/indian...in-visa-fraud/