How Thousands of Middlemen Are Gaming the H-1B Program - Bloomberg
How Thousands of Middlemen Are Gaming the H-1B Program - Bloomberg
This piece was an excellent example of investigative data journalism done well -- it turned something mind numbingly boring (bureaucratic US immigration rules) into something compelling and insightful.
Tl;dr out of the limited 85,000 H1-B visa slots every year, over 20,000 go to IT staffing firms which act as visa mills and often submit illegal duplicate applications. For standard Indian visa applicants, the wait time for a green card runs into several decades.
This article also made me think about how even within Indian immigrants, there is increasingly gulf between folks going through the standard H1-B path and those opting for more expensive 'investment visas', extraordinary individual visas (O-1), or employer-sponsored visas (L-1) (which are orders of magnitude faster). Needless to say, obtaining these requires far more financial and social capital - either several million dollars to invest in the US or prestigious jobs and networks willing to sponsor you.