H-1B visa: Your trip may be harrowing

By Praveen K Singh

CHANDIGARH: They come from cities and villages in Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh to apply for an H-1B visa, the category that allows certain speciality workers to live in the United States for as long as six years at a time.

These young graduates are assisted by employment consultants, promising to make things smooth at a cost of $ 2000 (about Rs 92,000 in Indian currency). An H-1B holds the promise of a lifetime of savings in exchange for a few years of hard work in the US of A.

But these employment consultants take advantage of the well-meaning visa applicants as the latter, mostly unqualified, are funnelled into the US by middlemen who help them with fake academic degrees and pad their resumes in order to secure the H-1B visas. These shady recruiters in India take several thousand dollars from the ``unqualified dreamer'' to provide him with some ``hurry-up'' computer training and an H-1B visa.

Sunil Kohli of Chandigarh is one of those who succumbed to the craze. He said he was duped by two Chandigarh-based firms into spending his life's savings of $ 6,000 - an enormous sum here, equivalent to a dozen years of pay for the average Indian - for a training course, an H-1B visa and a guaranteed software job in the US.

Kohli, 30, quit his job as a mechanical engineer and was scarcely trained as a programmer. His H-1B visa did come through, but the ``guaranteed'' job turned out to be a fiction. Kohli decided to go to the US anyway, leaving his pregnant wife behind in Patiala. He camped out with a string of relatives in four states, missed the birth of his daughter, and spent 11 months out of work. He applied at two dozen companies, but in vain.

These agencies promise much more than just training: there are the additional guarantees of both an H-1B visa and, say, a $ 50,000-a-year software job in the US. All too often, however, the training turns out to be haphazard, the visas don't come through or the jobs don't actually exist.

Last year, the US Senate raised the limit on the number of H-1Bs available each year to 1,95,000 for the next three years. It also changed some requirements and raised some fees to help the Immigration and Naturalisation Service speed up processing and handle a huge backlog of applications. But the new legislation failed to tackle abuse in the middleman industry, which has grown with every expansion of the H-1B programme.

US consulate officials estimate that 21 per cent of H-1B applications it received last year contained some kind of fraudulent information - forged college degrees, doctored resumes, phony work experience or phantom job offers. That figure, more recently, dropped to 11 per cent, with an additional three per cent of applications categorised as ``suspect''.

Degree forgeries are another large part of visa fraud. Small rings of forgers are busted now and again, but the Indian police and consumer agencies have been unable to control this abuse.