Team Trump is cracking down – Latest News
Team Trump’s anti-fraud campaigns are setting their sights on work-visa abuse — and never a second too quickly.
Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance and Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito introduced the launch of “a major investigation” meant to “combat fraud and human trafficking” within the H-1B visa program.
Labor officers have already fired off dozens of subpoenas as half of the probe.
D’Esposito instructed The Post that numerous H-1B visas, which let employers rent extremely expert foreigners for positions they will’t fill with US residents, have gone to fraudsters who’ve scammed “hundreds of millions” of {dollars} from the medical industry alone.
Team Trump’s give attention to government-related grift — a observe up on Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency efforts — has been concentrating on billions in health-care fraud.
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But the price of work-visa fraud goes properly past the loss of tax {dollars}.
The IG notes his workplace has already ID’d “employers and labor brokers” who “submitted fraudulent applications, exploited foreign workers through coercive wage-kickback arrangements, and undercut American workers by flooding the market with below-wage labor.”
Homeland Security opinions recommend as many as a fifth of H-1B petitions are fraudulent.
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These scams could not essentially contain stolen tax {dollars}, however they do fuel “violent crime,” explains D’Esposito, for the reason that fraud is usually “tied to cartels” and “transnational gangs.”
Schemes place unqualified foreigners “in medical facilities and doctors’ offices” who put “people in harm’s way.”
It’s the identical story as with different government-related fraud: Loose guidelines and lax enforcement permit crooks and schemers to take advantage of well-intentioned applications.
During the Biden open-borders period, H-1B approvals — like total unlawful immigration — peaked at 442,425.
Yet, as Vance notes, these visas have been meant “to ensure that if you were a brilliant technology person or a brilliant scientist or a brilliant doctor, you could come to the United States.”
Businesses — certainly, the nation — need these extremely expert people to help America keep its aggressive edge in technology, commerce and different areas.
So this fraud robs the whole economic system.
Of course, the H-1B program is a “patch” on an immigration system that doesn’t in any other case reward abilities or deal with the nation’s financial wants; the left for many years has blocked all bigger reforms to handle that failure.
But whereas it exists, it must run proper: Good on Team Trump for cracking down on yet one more rip-off that robs the whole nation.
