KRIKORIAN: H-1B Fraud Is Bad — What’s Legal Is Even Worse

Interesting donald trump, h 1b visa program, h 2b visas, illegal immigration, jd vance, u s department of homeland security admin July 22, 2026 0 Comments

KRIKORIAN: H-1B Fraud Is Bad — What’s Legal Is Even Worse

In recent months, investigations have uncovered staggering levels of fraud in government programs — from child care subsidies to Medicare to immigration benefits. Exposing fraud is important. But when it comes to immigration, there’s a danger that focusing on fraud will distract policymakers from the larger problem: many of the programs themselves are fundamentally flawed.

Take the H-1B program (please!), which is mainly used by the computer industry to import low-cost labor from India. Vice President J.D. Vance, the administration’s “fraud czar”, recently announced a major probe into H-1B fraud. To be clear, I’m certain Vance, if he were able, would make sweeping changes to the program, if not eliminate it altogether.

But there are others in the administration, possibly including the president himself, who think the H-1B program is just swell, and who hope that moving against fraud will defuse the growing public anger over the program’s effects.

There’s certainly massive fraud in the H-1B program. It starts with fake diplomas in India (one former foreign service officer who served there described “industrialized” fraud), and continues to exploitation of the foreign workers in the US and their frequent use in low-skill jobs.

But at the announcement of the anti-fraud initiative earlier this month, the vice president said, “American jobs ought to go to American workers and not foreign fraudsters”.

The problem is that even if everyone were following the rules, the H-1B program is specifically designed to allow corporations to replace American workers with cheaper foreign labor. When a front-page New York Times story a decade ago reported that Disney had fired its American IT staff and replaced them with H-1Bs — and forced them to train their replacements as a condition of receiving severance pay — politicians fumed at the injustice of it all. Except that the laws they themselves wrote made that practice perfectly legal, and it’s been repeated hundreds of times across the country.

The administration has nibbled around the edges of the H-1B program, slightly raising the wages that have to be paid and making it slightly harder to use it to import cheap labor, but the changes are small beer compared to what is needed. Fuming about fraud without in the same breath supporting legislation like Republican Texas Rep. Chip Roy’s “American White-Collar Worker Jobs Act” is missing the point — abuse isn’t the problem, the program is the problem.

The same theme runs throughout our immigration system. ICE this spring identified massive fraud in the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, one part of which allows foreign students who have graduated to work for up to three years on their foreign student visas. That’s great, but OPT is illegal on its face (you’re only allowed to be here on a student visa while enrolled in “a full course of study”) and the courts have punted, deferring to the bureaucracy. Because OPT is a purely made-up program, the administration could simply end it. But it’s hoping that the fraud talk will reduce the pressure to do so.

The H-2B visa is another example. This is for seasonal, non-agricultural, low-skill jobs in fields like hotels, construction, landscaping, even carnivals. The Department of Homeland Security site has a page on Combating Fraud and Abuse in the H-2B Visa Program, but every year approves an increase in the number of such workers employers are legally permitted to import. The program shouldn’t exist at all — if carnivals can’t find workers, let them pay more — but how about at least not increasing it?

Fraud should be prosecuted aggressively. But policymakers shouldn’t mistake cleaning up abuse for fixing bad law.