July 31, 2024 • 17 mins
Each year in April, the US conducts a lottery that shapes the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. And each year, only around 85,000 are granted an H-1B visa for highly-skilled workers. With skyrocketing application numbers, the odds of winning have only gotten slimmer. But new data obtained by Bloomberg News has revealed how certain companies have manipulated the system, gaining an advantage over people who play it fair. In other words, the game was rigged.
On today’s Big Take podcast, host Sarah Holder speaks to investigative journalists Eric Fan and Zachary Mider who explain how outsourcing companies and staffing firms exploited loopholes in the H-1B system to get extra shots at the lottery.
Read more: How Thousands of Middlemen Are Gaming the H-1B Program
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
When Sandeep mcganty first moved to the US from India
for college, he had a passion for technology and a
laser focus on the future.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
I was a teenager that was hoping to build a
whole new life and whole new career and trying to
see where my lux are all my hard work takes me.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
At that point, after getting a computer science degree from
Arizona State University, he teamed up with a fellow Asulum
to launch a startup.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
It's an AA powered real estate investment platform. We run
the models on the back end, predicting the revenue of
a short term real estate investments or a commercial real
estate investments.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Sindeep said. They raised four hundred thousand dollars from a
private investor and turn their idea into a company valued
at over a million dollars. It was just a few
years into his time in the US and he was
already on track to build the kind of life and
career he dreamed of as a teenager, but something else
loomed over him. He'd managed to stay in the country
legally through a student visa and a series of work authorizations,
(01:08):
but a status in the States was still temporary, and
that meant he was living with a lot of uncertainty
and throughout all this sun deep did your immigration status
weigh on you at all? How did it impact your work?
Speaker 3 (01:21):
So that's been the whole problem. You can't have a
solid decisions or like anything solid till you have your
immiglations plans solid because you can't buy a house, or
you can't build a business, or you can't do whatever
you are looking for in your life. It's not something
you can be stable on. It impacts in every decision
(01:41):
that you are making in your life.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Sundeep wanted a more long term plan, so he stepped
away from the day to day of running his startup,
got a job at another US based company, and set
his sights on the H one B, a visa designed
for highly skilled workers with employers in the US. A
limited number of H one BE visas are handed out
each year through a lottery system, and the first time
(02:04):
he applied he wasn't picked, or the next or the next.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
It was really devastating for me. I was like eighty
years into the United States and I still don't have
a life which I can rely on or a carrier
that I can rely on, so I don't have a
clarity on what I need to do.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Sandeep had the job and the sponsor, but his lottery
ticket wasn't drawn.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
His qualification didn't matter. He's investment and entrepreneurship didn't matter.
The fact that he was already employing people and starting
a company here didn't matter. It was a complete game
of luck.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Eric vonn is an investigative data reporter at Bloomberg and
for the past few months he's been looking into how
the h to one B system actually works, and he
found that there's something else at play, making that game
of luck even more precarious, and it's stacking the deck
against work and employers who seem to be doing everything right. Today.
(03:05):
On the show, a Bloomberg investigation reveals how companies have
been exploiting loopholes to gain the H one B system
and what that could mean for hundreds of thousands of
visa hopefuls. Every year, employers in the US submit hundreds
(03:26):
of thousands of applications for H one b's, hoping to
give their employees a shot at a visa. N H
one B typically lasts up to six years and is
often an on ramp to permanent residency. The number of
visas awarded every year is currently capped at about eighty
five thousand. But when Eric tried to figure out the
chances of getting one, he noticed that between twenty twenty
(03:47):
and twenty twenty three, the number of applications for that
limited pool had doubled. That meant the odds of getting
an H one B visa were getting worse fast.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
So as I talk to my friend, they said, go
on line. It became very apparent that there's a huge
problem in the system.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
And that problem goes back to the way the system
was designed.
Speaker 4 (04:09):
Since the very beginning, the program has sort of been
dogged by concerns that certain companies were kind of finding
a way to get a disproportionate share of the visas.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
That's Bloomberg investigative reporter Zachmeider. He says the flaws in
the system trace back to the way that H one
B program was set up in response to pressure from
tech companies that started building in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 4 (04:36):
Employers in the US were telling Congress, we can't get
enough workers in certain fields, especially kind of high tech fields,
and so when Congress reformed its immigration laws in nineteen
ninety they said, we're going to create this category of
visa called H one B that's going to be specifically
for kind of high skilled workers that you don't think
(04:56):
you can find in the American job market.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
At first, this system was first come, first serve. The
vision was that employers would apply for the visas gradually
throughout the year, and once they ran out, the government
would stop granting them. But by the mid two thousands
it was clear that the system needed to change because
on April first every year, when the visa application window opened,
the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services Office would be overrun.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Hundreds of thousands of applications would comeing in literal paper
boxes from FedEx, and the US government would have so
much trouble process in those paperwork there wasn't enough time
for them to figure out who came first and who
came second. It became a necessity to run a random.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Lottery, a random lottery with very expensive tickets.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Imports had to file a full visa application, which run
hundreds of pages. They have to pay thousands of dollars
in application fees. They have to describe exactly what job
they want to fail here's the individual, here's the job,
here's the salary we kind of pay them. Here's the
location to go work from.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
But in any lottery, the odds of winning go up
if you buy more tickets. The same principle applied to
the H one B lottery. Employers who could submit more
applications had a better chance of getting their employees' visas,
and zach says that gave an advantage to certain types
of companies, like huge it outsourcing firms mostly based overseas.
Speaker 4 (06:30):
Let's say you're an outsourcing company that has two one
hundred thousand workers in India and you have a need
for a certain number of those workers to be in
the United States for a certain period of time. If
you say, figure you need a thousand of them next year,
but you're not too particular about which thousand, then you
(06:51):
can simply do the math and you could say, well,
my chances of success in the lottery are are, you know,
twenty five percent, and I need one thousand people. So
I'll put in four thousand applications of people who would
be good enough at those roles and I'll get about
one thousand. And so while your company that just had
the one worker has a twenty five percent chance of
(07:13):
getting what they want. The outsourcing company can kind of
leverage its foreign workforce to get one hundred percent of
the visas they want.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
In twenty twenty, the Trump administration changed the application process.
Instead of entering the lottery with a full fledged application,
employers would only need to fill out a short form
and pay a ten dollars fee to get their employee's
name in the mix. Then, only if their lottery ticket
was drawn would they need to go through with the
whole application. The goal was to cut down on paperwork
(07:43):
and save money, but it also had another effect.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
And that massively increase the opportunity to flood the lottery.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
When tickets got cheaper in twenty twenty, Eric and Zach
said it created opportunities for another kind of company to
gain the system. Staffing firms. These firms essentially work as
middleman recruiting foreign workers and connecting them with contract jobs
at US based companies, and part of their pitch is
that they can get you in each one B visa
(08:14):
because of how a depth they've become at gaming the system.
Speaker 4 (08:18):
The new opportunity worked like this, if I have a
person who I want to help get a visa. I
can simply just create a bunch of other companies or
just conspire with other companies that already exist to put
that person's name in multiple times. And so it becomes
a system where essentially, if someone wants a visa and
(08:41):
they can kind of work with these a group of
these very small companies, they can almost be guaranteed to
get one. And so the chances really skyrocket for people
who are willing to work with these kind of companies
that are willing to cheat and kind of budge ahead
in the lottery. And so anybody who's just doing it
the old fact way of like I actually have a
(09:01):
real job and I want this work or to have
an H and B, they get pushed to the end
of the line because they're not putting the person's name
in more than once.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Zach says. Those staffing firms have been able to fly
under the radar because many of them are very small.
Speaker 4 (09:16):
If it was Apple or Tesla that did this, I
think with thousands of employees, I think the government would
have caught on pretty quickly and probably tried to do
something to them. But these are all like companies you've
never heard of. Often that don't really have much physical existence,
like maybe they have an office, maybe they don't. Maybe
(09:37):
they're just like an LLC that somebody created without much
real existence at all.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
For a long time, it was impossible for reporters like
Eric and Zach to figure out the extent of the
problem or which companies were the worst offenders.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
That data was never public and we had to file
a FOY lawsuit. So for the first time we're able
to say exactly how many companies are gaining the system,
and we were very surprised because we've found thousands and thousands
of them, and it became immediately clear that these staffing
(10:12):
companies have sometimes ninety nine percent one hundred percent of
their entries. Are these multiple entries as compared to a
regular company such as Apple, Google would usually have less
than five percent.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
There are legitimate reasons for someone to have multiple applications
entered on their behalf, say if they have competing offers
from several companies to sponsor them, but those situations are uncommon.
So when Eric found these instances in which one hundred
percent of the company's applicants were being entered multiple times,
the stat was striking.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
I thought there was a problem, but it was so
much worse than I imagined. And it turned out almost
half of all the vs that were approved last year
when you're either outsourcing or staffing companies, meaning for most
of the folks who study and live and work in
(11:13):
the US who have a job offer from one of
the top companies like Google and Tesla, they're losing out.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
So Eric and Zach identified the biggest H one B cheaters.
The question was would anything be done to stop them?
That's after the break. A Bloomberg investigation found that about
(11:44):
half of the coveted H one B skilled worker visas
between twenty twenty and twenty twenty three were going to
outsourcing companies and staffing firms, and then an estimated one
in six involved the slippery tactic of submitting multiple lottery
entries for the same person. What's the impact of this
type of gaming of the system? Who exactly is this hurting?
Speaker 4 (12:05):
I think the big picture is it's hurting the American economy.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
According to a twenty twenty three Wharton School study, for
every ten H one B visas the top US multinational
companies lose out on, nine jobs are moved abroad. The
Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond estimated that reducing the number
of high skilled immigrant workers in the US by ten
percent would shrink the economy by about eighty six billion dollars.
(12:30):
So there's the economic toll, there's the toll on H
one B hopefuls who are competing in a lottery that's rigged,
and then there's the toll on the H one B
recipients whose futures are now tied to companies that skirt
the rules.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
So I've interviewed a number of workers and formal workers
at these staffing companies, and what they told me was
they usually knew full wow that staffing companies pay them
very little, and there was no job security, and they
often had to sign contracts that forbid them from leaving
(13:07):
the company for years, and most equageously, they were often
asked to pay the lawyer fees and visa fees and
registration fees, which is not allowed.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Eric and Zach wanted to know what happened to the
companies that they found were bending the rules.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
Now, some of the visa recipients have had their visas
taken away and have to be sent home or whatever.
But the companies themselves which offer were kind of the
masterminds of this don't really have any consequences that we
can see. And so what the government says in response
is essentially they don't have the authority to bar anyone
(13:45):
from the lottery, and so as long as people keep
submitting applications and there's nothing on the application that looks suspect,
they have to keep handing out visas to these companies.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Have you gotten comment from any of these companies, what
do they say about their practices.
Speaker 4 (14:03):
We spoke to a representative of the staffing industry who
said that the laws are actually pretty vague and that
in his view, it wasn't really clear, especially during the
first couple of years of this new program, that it
was actually forbidden to collude with other companies to put
people's names in multiple times. And even after it kind
(14:25):
of became more clear that that wasn't allowed under the law,
the government may have not followed the proper procedures to
kind of make sure everyone is aware of that. And
so from the staffing industry's perspective, it wasn't so much
cheating as more just like they saw an opportunity in
the law and they took.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
It that opportunity. No longer exists. Last year, the US
government made a significant change to the system that shifted
the dynamics of the lottery.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
So last year the government introduced new rules so that
each candidate has an equal chance in the lottery. So
instead of selecting on the number of registrations submitted by employers,
each candidate, regardless of how many registrations they have, has
an equal chance. So that drastically removed the incentive to cheat.
(15:21):
That removed the incentive for staffing companies to collude and
submit multiple registrations.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
And Eric says that change has had an immediate effect.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
This year, according to government data, the number of multiple
registrations decline ninety percent.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Specific loopholes like these have been opening and closing for decades.
But a big takeaway of Erican Zac's reporting is that
the H one B program has fallen far short of
its initial goal.
Speaker 4 (15:48):
Immigration is a very difficult issue for Washington. The last
time there was a real effort to reform the immigration
system was more than a decade ago, and it kind
of famously failed and collapsed. And up until this point,
even when there's been times of a lot of consensus
about fixing H one B, it's always been thought of
(16:11):
as something we have to resolve as part of this
bigger immigration deal, which means that in practice it will
never get done.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
This episode was produced by David Fox. It was edited
by Aaron Edwards and Jason Grotto. It was fact checked
by Adrianna Tapia and mixed by Blake Maples. Our senior
producers are Kim Gettlelson and Naomi Shaven, and our senior
editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Nicole bumsterbor is Our executive producer.
(16:44):
Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks so much
for listening. Please follow and review The Big Take wherever
you get your podcasts. It helps new listeners find the show.
We'll be back tomorrow
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
When Sandeep mcganty first moved to the US from India
for college, he had a passion for technology and a
laser focus on the future.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
I was a teenager that was hoping to build a
whole new life and whole new career and trying to
see where my lux are all my hard work takes me.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
At that point, after getting a computer science degree from
Arizona State University, he teamed up with a fellow Asulum
to launch a startup.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
It's an AA powered real estate investment platform. We run
the models on the back end, predicting the revenue of
a short term real estate investments or a commercial real
estate investments.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Sindeep said. They raised four hundred thousand dollars from a
private investor and turn their idea into a company valued
at over a million dollars. It was just a few
years into his time in the US and he was
already on track to build the kind of life and
career he dreamed of as a teenager, but something else
loomed over him. He'd managed to stay in the country
legally through a student visa and a series of work authorizations,
(01:08):
but a status in the States was still temporary, and
that meant he was living with a lot of uncertainty
and throughout all this sun deep did your immigration status
weigh on you at all? How did it impact your work?
Speaker 3 (01:21):
So that's been the whole problem. You can't have a
solid decisions or like anything solid till you have your
immiglations plans solid because you can't buy a house, or
you can't build a business, or you can't do whatever
you are looking for in your life. It's not something
you can be stable on. It impacts in every decision
(01:41):
that you are making in your life.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Sundeep wanted a more long term plan, so he stepped
away from the day to day of running his startup,
got a job at another US based company, and set
his sights on the H one B, a visa designed
for highly skilled workers with employers in the US. A
limited number of H one BE visas are handed out
each year through a lottery system, and the first time
(02:04):
he applied he wasn't picked, or the next or the next.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
It was really devastating for me. I was like eighty
years into the United States and I still don't have
a life which I can rely on or a carrier
that I can rely on, so I don't have a
clarity on what I need to do.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Sandeep had the job and the sponsor, but his lottery
ticket wasn't drawn.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
His qualification didn't matter. He's investment and entrepreneurship didn't matter.
The fact that he was already employing people and starting
a company here didn't matter. It was a complete game
of luck.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Eric vonn is an investigative data reporter at Bloomberg and
for the past few months he's been looking into how
the h to one B system actually works, and he
found that there's something else at play, making that game
of luck even more precarious, and it's stacking the deck
against work and employers who seem to be doing everything right. Today.
(03:05):
On the show, a Bloomberg investigation reveals how companies have
been exploiting loopholes to gain the H one B system
and what that could mean for hundreds of thousands of
visa hopefuls. Every year, employers in the US submit hundreds
(03:26):
of thousands of applications for H one b's, hoping to
give their employees a shot at a visa. N H
one B typically lasts up to six years and is
often an on ramp to permanent residency. The number of
visas awarded every year is currently capped at about eighty
five thousand. But when Eric tried to figure out the
chances of getting one, he noticed that between twenty twenty
(03:47):
and twenty twenty three, the number of applications for that
limited pool had doubled. That meant the odds of getting
an H one B visa were getting worse fast.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
So as I talk to my friend, they said, go
on line. It became very apparent that there's a huge
problem in the system.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
And that problem goes back to the way the system
was designed.
Speaker 4 (04:09):
Since the very beginning, the program has sort of been
dogged by concerns that certain companies were kind of finding
a way to get a disproportionate share of the visas.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
That's Bloomberg investigative reporter Zachmeider. He says the flaws in
the system trace back to the way that H one
B program was set up in response to pressure from
tech companies that started building in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 4 (04:36):
Employers in the US were telling Congress, we can't get
enough workers in certain fields, especially kind of high tech fields,
and so when Congress reformed its immigration laws in nineteen
ninety they said, we're going to create this category of
visa called H one B that's going to be specifically
for kind of high skilled workers that you don't think
(04:56):
you can find in the American job market.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
At first, this system was first come, first serve. The
vision was that employers would apply for the visas gradually
throughout the year, and once they ran out, the government
would stop granting them. But by the mid two thousands
it was clear that the system needed to change because
on April first every year, when the visa application window opened,
the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services Office would be overrun.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Hundreds of thousands of applications would comeing in literal paper
boxes from FedEx, and the US government would have so
much trouble process in those paperwork there wasn't enough time
for them to figure out who came first and who
came second. It became a necessity to run a random.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Lottery, a random lottery with very expensive tickets.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Imports had to file a full visa application, which run
hundreds of pages. They have to pay thousands of dollars
in application fees. They have to describe exactly what job
they want to fail here's the individual, here's the job,
here's the salary we kind of pay them. Here's the
location to go work from.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
But in any lottery, the odds of winning go up
if you buy more tickets. The same principle applied to
the H one B lottery. Employers who could submit more
applications had a better chance of getting their employees' visas,
and zach says that gave an advantage to certain types
of companies, like huge it outsourcing firms mostly based overseas.
Speaker 4 (06:30):
Let's say you're an outsourcing company that has two one
hundred thousand workers in India and you have a need
for a certain number of those workers to be in
the United States for a certain period of time. If
you say, figure you need a thousand of them next year,
but you're not too particular about which thousand, then you
(06:51):
can simply do the math and you could say, well,
my chances of success in the lottery are are, you know,
twenty five percent, and I need one thousand people. So
I'll put in four thousand applications of people who would
be good enough at those roles and I'll get about
one thousand. And so while your company that just had
the one worker has a twenty five percent chance of
(07:13):
getting what they want. The outsourcing company can kind of
leverage its foreign workforce to get one hundred percent of
the visas they want.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
In twenty twenty, the Trump administration changed the application process.
Instead of entering the lottery with a full fledged application,
employers would only need to fill out a short form
and pay a ten dollars fee to get their employee's
name in the mix. Then, only if their lottery ticket
was drawn would they need to go through with the
whole application. The goal was to cut down on paperwork
(07:43):
and save money, but it also had another effect.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
And that massively increase the opportunity to flood the lottery.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
When tickets got cheaper in twenty twenty, Eric and Zach
said it created opportunities for another kind of company to
gain the system. Staffing firms. These firms essentially work as
middleman recruiting foreign workers and connecting them with contract jobs
at US based companies, and part of their pitch is
that they can get you in each one B visa
(08:14):
because of how a depth they've become at gaming the system.
Speaker 4 (08:18):
The new opportunity worked like this, if I have a
person who I want to help get a visa. I
can simply just create a bunch of other companies or
just conspire with other companies that already exist to put
that person's name in multiple times. And so it becomes
a system where essentially, if someone wants a visa and
(08:41):
they can kind of work with these a group of
these very small companies, they can almost be guaranteed to
get one. And so the chances really skyrocket for people
who are willing to work with these kind of companies
that are willing to cheat and kind of budge ahead
in the lottery. And so anybody who's just doing it
the old fact way of like I actually have a
(09:01):
real job and I want this work or to have
an H and B, they get pushed to the end
of the line because they're not putting the person's name
in more than once.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Zach says. Those staffing firms have been able to fly
under the radar because many of them are very small.
Speaker 4 (09:16):
If it was Apple or Tesla that did this, I
think with thousands of employees, I think the government would
have caught on pretty quickly and probably tried to do
something to them. But these are all like companies you've
never heard of. Often that don't really have much physical existence,
like maybe they have an office, maybe they don't. Maybe
(09:37):
they're just like an LLC that somebody created without much
real existence at all.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
For a long time, it was impossible for reporters like
Eric and Zach to figure out the extent of the
problem or which companies were the worst offenders.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
That data was never public and we had to file
a FOY lawsuit. So for the first time we're able
to say exactly how many companies are gaining the system,
and we were very surprised because we've found thousands and thousands
of them, and it became immediately clear that these staffing
(10:12):
companies have sometimes ninety nine percent one hundred percent of
their entries. Are these multiple entries as compared to a
regular company such as Apple, Google would usually have less
than five percent.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
There are legitimate reasons for someone to have multiple applications
entered on their behalf, say if they have competing offers
from several companies to sponsor them, but those situations are uncommon.
So when Eric found these instances in which one hundred
percent of the company's applicants were being entered multiple times,
the stat was striking.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
I thought there was a problem, but it was so
much worse than I imagined. And it turned out almost
half of all the vs that were approved last year
when you're either outsourcing or staffing companies, meaning for most
of the folks who study and live and work in
(11:13):
the US who have a job offer from one of
the top companies like Google and Tesla, they're losing out.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
So Eric and Zach identified the biggest H one B cheaters.
The question was would anything be done to stop them?
That's after the break. A Bloomberg investigation found that about
(11:44):
half of the coveted H one B skilled worker visas
between twenty twenty and twenty twenty three were going to
outsourcing companies and staffing firms, and then an estimated one
in six involved the slippery tactic of submitting multiple lottery
entries for the same person. What's the impact of this
type of gaming of the system? Who exactly is this hurting?
Speaker 4 (12:05):
I think the big picture is it's hurting the American economy.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
According to a twenty twenty three Wharton School study, for
every ten H one B visas the top US multinational
companies lose out on, nine jobs are moved abroad. The
Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond estimated that reducing the number
of high skilled immigrant workers in the US by ten
percent would shrink the economy by about eighty six billion dollars.
(12:30):
So there's the economic toll, there's the toll on H
one B hopefuls who are competing in a lottery that's rigged,
and then there's the toll on the H one B
recipients whose futures are now tied to companies that skirt
the rules.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
So I've interviewed a number of workers and formal workers
at these staffing companies, and what they told me was
they usually knew full wow that staffing companies pay them
very little, and there was no job security, and they
often had to sign contracts that forbid them from leaving
(13:07):
the company for years, and most equageously, they were often
asked to pay the lawyer fees and visa fees and
registration fees, which is not allowed.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Eric and Zach wanted to know what happened to the
companies that they found were bending the rules.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
Now, some of the visa recipients have had their visas
taken away and have to be sent home or whatever.
But the companies themselves which offer were kind of the
masterminds of this don't really have any consequences that we
can see. And so what the government says in response
is essentially they don't have the authority to bar anyone
(13:45):
from the lottery, and so as long as people keep
submitting applications and there's nothing on the application that looks suspect,
they have to keep handing out visas to these companies.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Have you gotten comment from any of these companies, what
do they say about their practices.
Speaker 4 (14:03):
We spoke to a representative of the staffing industry who
said that the laws are actually pretty vague and that
in his view, it wasn't really clear, especially during the
first couple of years of this new program, that it
was actually forbidden to collude with other companies to put
people's names in multiple times. And even after it kind
(14:25):
of became more clear that that wasn't allowed under the law,
the government may have not followed the proper procedures to
kind of make sure everyone is aware of that. And
so from the staffing industry's perspective, it wasn't so much
cheating as more just like they saw an opportunity in
the law and they took.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
It that opportunity. No longer exists. Last year, the US
government made a significant change to the system that shifted
the dynamics of the lottery.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
So last year the government introduced new rules so that
each candidate has an equal chance in the lottery. So
instead of selecting on the number of registrations submitted by employers,
each candidate, regardless of how many registrations they have, has
an equal chance. So that drastically removed the incentive to cheat.
(15:21):
That removed the incentive for staffing companies to collude and
submit multiple registrations.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
And Eric says that change has had an immediate effect.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
This year, according to government data, the number of multiple
registrations decline ninety percent.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Specific loopholes like these have been opening and closing for decades.
But a big takeaway of Erican Zac's reporting is that
the H one B program has fallen far short of
its initial goal.
Speaker 4 (15:48):
Immigration is a very difficult issue for Washington. The last
time there was a real effort to reform the immigration
system was more than a decade ago, and it kind
of famously failed and collapsed. And up until this point,
even when there's been times of a lot of consensus
about fixing H one B, it's always been thought of
(16:11):
as something we have to resolve as part of this
bigger immigration deal, which means that in practice it will
never get done.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
This episode was produced by David Fox. It was edited
by Aaron Edwards and Jason Grotto. It was fact checked
by Adrianna Tapia and mixed by Blake Maples. Our senior
producers are Kim Gettlelson and Naomi Shaven, and our senior
editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Nicole bumsterbor is Our executive producer.
(16:44):
Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks so much
for listening. Please follow and review The Big Take wherever
you get your podcasts. It helps new listeners find the show.
We'll be back tomorrow
Hosts And Creators
Sarah Holder
Saleha Mohsin
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