How "consultancies" mass import Indians to take American jobs

If you’ve ever wondered why so many Indians are in the U.S. right now and they’ve colonized entire sectors of employment like IT, the phenomenon of “bodyshops,” or consultancies, is a major reason why. Consultancies are firms that specialize in providing foreign contractors to American corporations on short-term contracts, primarily workers in the IT field. The vast majority of them are based in India and recruit Indian workers, and major ones include Cognizant, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), and HCLTech. These consultancies exist primarily to funnel as many Indians to the U.S. as possible on H-1B and other visas, and the investigative reporting of myself and other journalists shows that these bodyshops engage in shady business practices and fraud in order to profit, displacing American workers in the process. The term “bodyshop” itself is a pejorative reference to their operations; providing bodies, and lots of them.

How Bodyshops Discriminate Against Non-Indians

“Body shopping” has been a reality in the tech industry since the mid-90s, but has ramped up considerably in the past decade as corporations seek to cut costs, since the foreign contractors that bodyshops import into the U.S. are paid less than American workers. The term “WITCH firms” is used to refer to the five largest bodyshops in the U.S.: Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, and HCLTech.

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While theoretically anyone can work for a bodyshop, since Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of national origin, the reality is that many bodyshops overtly discriminate against non-Indian workers. Two prominent bodyshops, Tech Mahindra and the aforementioned Cognizant, have been prosecuted by the Department of Labor in recent years for illegal discrimination against non-Indians.

A major reason why bodyshops continue to engage in racist discrimination against non-Indians is because the penalties handed out by the federal government are too lax. Tech Mahindra was only fined $500 million, a small amount of the firm’s yearly revenue. It’s not dissimilar to the various controversies about “indecent” broadcasting in the 2000s, such as Janet Jackson’s “nip slip” at the 2004 Super Bowl; the FCC only fined CBS $550,000, which amounts to pocket change for a corporation whose yearly revenue is in the billions. Firms such as Cognizant are willing to pay the fines without actually changing their behavior because the profit from mass importing Indians far outweighs any punishment the federal government is willing to mete out.

Insiders have informed me to the extent in which Cognizant and other bodyshops preference Indians—specifically Indians from India—over all other nationalities and ethnicities. Here is an internal spreadsheet on the national origins of Cognizant employees:

As the chart shows, 56 percent of Cognizant staffers are from India. The insider also informed me that the employees from the U.S., Canada, and the Netherlands are primarily Indians on visas, meaning roughly three-quarters of Cognizant staffers are Indian. This overwhelming ethnic dominance at a supposedly multinational firm cannot occur naturally; it is the result of blatant ethnic nepotism. Moreover, a former Cognizant staffer revealed that when Cognizant does hire Americans, it’s for the sole purpose of training Indians in specialized knowledge fields for the purpose of replacing Americans in their own jobs. Another ex-Cognizant staffer stated that Cognizant fired all Americans from leadership positions after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential race.

This active discrimination against non-Indians also occurs in the non-American divisions of multinational bodyshops. A former staffer for Cognizant’s Mexican division stated he watched the Mexican operations gradually be taken over by Indians to the point where “they [now] sell ‘Mexico’ to clients with a[n] all Indian leadership team.”

An insider provided details on how the replacement of Americans by bodyshop Indians works, with focus on the bodyshops Infosys and Wipro:

Okay so the general flow [I]’ve witnessed is this: higher end contractor (H-1B typically) is hired through Infosys. Immediately starts asking for resources. The easiest ask is QA resources; those will be cheap and they get them from some farm in India. but regardless of the job function, the end result seems to be the same: obscure project responsibility, drag out timelines, use it as a mill to pad experience for a never ending underperforming group of Indian contractors, and actively work to blame American workers.

The Indian contractors many times negotiate these agreements and you end up in unfavorable scenarios where you can fire anyone for any reason, but you can’t see the replacement’s resume and you can’t interview them. They’ll have someone in that seat the next day, but you have no control over it. This KILLS the project for a ton of reasons it’s not worth getting into, but mainly it’s because you’re continually retraining. Kills the budget eventually. and less control over the narrative exists for FTE employees of the company [because] many times you CAN’T UNDERSTAND these people or they ignore you or obfuscate progress or lack thereof.

The next step is hiring a very competent Indian contractor (usually female) to come and whip the team into shape. The original Infosys hire will push for this within Infosys. And they will do it. She’ll clean it up and overreport because she’s got [lieutenants] to assign to this project you’ll never meet. And then it’s game over. The budget is out of your hands at this point because the project is out of your hands. And those managerial performers create a wall between you and Indian contractors.

You don’t ever know exactly what’s happening but you know it isn’t good. You see names you don’t recognize in meetings on large projects. Or you notice the budgets keep getting bigger with more Infosys and their related sub-Indian firms.

And it always leads to firing Americans. Because you can trade two Americans for eight devs. And at this point, the ‘Americans’ they hire, if they do, are just American born or naturalized Indians. I’ve seen it for years. Every successive wave of layoffs since Covid has pushed all of this incrementally, in almost every tech department, and now some of the adjacent verticals. people don’t understand that maybe 80-90 percent of some ‘American company’ code at this point is done by non-Americans, and now other job functions are being taken over as the invasion has much more power over much of senior tech leadership at this point.

Another insider provides information on TCS operations:

I lost positions to Indians. Their entire sr mgmt is Indians. They’re also sexist-looking at their Sr Mgmt. I think they may have just added 1 woman-indian of course. One of their big clients-[REDACTED]...managed entirely by Indians. Their end game-bring as many as they can. They never post job openings-just fill em offshore or ship em here...with their family of course. So now they have their kids here.

I just got released from [an account]. Only reason I’ve got a new [account]...[REDACTED]-insisting on US ONSHORE ONLY.

An observable pattern is that if an Indian is placed in a managerial position at a corporation, their first move will be to begin laying off Americans and replacing them with Indians, either from bodyshops or via offshoring. Some individuals have referred to this process as the “Indian mafia,” stating that it is impossible to get hired at an Indian-run firm if you are not Indian yourself. One insider at NTT DATA laid out how Indians effectively colonized the company once an Indian CEO took over. Indians will abuse processes such as “stack-ranking” (a method of rating employee performance) to intentionally force their American colleagues out by rating them poorly even if their performance is competent to excellent. This process accelerated during the Biden administration and has continued into 2025.

Bodyshops and Visa/Employment Fraud

I have procured many examples from insiders of bodyshops engaging in visa fraud as well as employment fraud where candidates fake their resumes, credentials and skills in order to secure employment. One insider provides examples from the bodyshop Mphasis:

Mphasis: rampant resume fraud (including fraudulently obtained credentials). I’ve seen and interviewed candidates that were blatantly using an LLM on another monitor. Other things I’ve observed are candidates lying about skills (e.g. not knowing how to use Git as a developer with 8 YOE).

Another insider reports that he recently interviewed an Indian H-1B developer from Mphasis who supposedly has twelve-plus years of experience. The developer “doesn’t know the basic GIT commands to create a new commit object or how to push a commit from a local branch to a remote repo.” An insider at Fidelity Investments further details that while Indian job candidates would perform decently in their interviews, they would suddenly become incompetent when they actually started working for the company. Examples given include senior and principal engineers who can’t perform basic tasks like merging a pull request or sending a message in understandable English:

The Fidelity insider reports having to walk through and do tickets for senior Indian engineers because they had no clue how to do them on their own despite claiming “years of full stack experience” on their resumes. Bodyshops have been caught stealing resumes from qualified applicants and replacing the names and pictures with Indians who they actually want to hire.

With regards to visa fraud, a former insider with Voya Financial saw an Indian manager illegally conspiring to commit visa fraud with an H-1B underling. He watched the Indian-American manager coaching the H-1B worker to give false responses in his upcoming interview with USCIS, telling him to claim he was a manager with multiple staffers reporting to him. Said manager reiterated that despite what the H-1B told USCIS, he would continue to work as an individual contributor, not a manager. The manager also told the H-1B worker that lying to USCIS in this manner would help him transition to an EB-1 visa.

A Canadian ex-Cognizant staffer revealed that Indians who migrate to Canada are hired by Cognizant solely so they can obtain Canadian citizenship and move to the U.S. on L-1B or TN visas, the latter of which allow Canadians and Mexicans to work in the U.S. This staffer said they were hired knowing full well their sole motivation was to obtain an L-1B or TN. Additionally, Cognizant’s Canadian division deliberately hires people who are willing to work for less money than an actual Canadian solely to get transferred to the U.S. Another ex-staffer discussed how Indian women employed by Cognizant will bring their Indian husbands over to the U.S. and immediately get pregnant so they can have an anchor baby.

Another insider revealed a possible pay-to-play operation concerning H-1Bs in Burlington County, New Jersey. According to him, he asked a consulting group in Burlington County how they got their H-1Bs. The group gets them by paying an “immigration lawyer” $10,000, who in turn pays a congressman half of that, which allows the firm to get as many H-1Bs as they want. Bodyshops themselves are known to receive kickbacks via their corporate contracts.

Bodyshops and Labor Abuses

Indians employed by bodyshops are frequently subjected to inhumane working conditions, including excessive overtime, wage theft, and more. An insider at Bectran, Inc., a Schaumburg, Illinois-based software firm, described the working conditions that Indian H-1Bs endure:

H-1B employees are routinely required to work late into the night, far beyond normal business hours, and often appear exhausted and run down. In some cases, employees have arrived at work with strong body odor, likely related to the excessive hours, lack of rest, and insufficient time for personal hygiene. The few U.S. citizens who have been assigned to these teams have ultimately left, citing unsustainable working conditions.

Another insider reports from another firm:

As far as personnel management goes, they do not provide legally required time off to their employees for parental leave for the birth of a new child. These H-1Bs are basically interchangeable slaves.

Indians employed by bodyshops are in many ways treated worse than animals. Bodyshops will often threaten H-1Bs with deportation if they don’t accept poor working conditions and contracts that lowball them on pay. They prefer hiring other Indians in part because Indians are extremely submissive to authority compared to Americans and are less willing to speak up when they are being abused or their managers are breaking the law.

Indian-run firms will attempt to impose these poor working conditions on non-Indians. The Canadian ex-Cognizant employee told me that Cognizant may be engaged in wage theft, as it took them two months to get their first paycheck. Another insider reports on his experience with an Indian bodyshop:

I have been working for one [an Indian outsourcing firm] (multi-layer contract, five layers where each layer takes a cut of my pay) and they [are] not paying me on a consistent basis (had to chase down my first check), [took] an extra week to approve my timesheet, never told me when I was going to be paid so I am stuck chasing down my payments and making me interview offshore candidates without technically ever been paid for my work. Very dehumanizing, I need medication for a health issue and don’t have benefits so I can’t get my medicine. I am literally a descendent of war heroes for this nation.

The contract in question is a multi-vendor contract for a well-known healthcare client that uses Medicare/Medicaid through one of the big Indian outsourcing firms. I am in five layers meaning five other companies take a cut of my salary and I need to chase them to get paid. They treat me like garbage, they rushed me into the role, I took it because I was desperate and they never told me when I get paid. They have me literally interviewing offshore candidates as a 1099 who hasn’t been there long myself, my salary is garbage, its a junior salary while expecting senior level work. I literally have no clue when I am getting paid and can never get anything in writing and it sounds like their plan all along was to bring me in to help stabilize a software upgrade and replace me with offshore.

These problems have been present with bodyshops for a very long time; a 2014 investigation by NBC Bay Area revealed extensive visa fraud and abusive labor practices among bodyshops in the San Francisco area.

Bodyshops, Labor Redundancy, and the Third Worldization of the American Economy

A common thread in bodyshop operations and their corporate clients is that the bodyshops will pressure corporations into hiring more Indians then they actually need. In some cases, corporations will actually receive kickbacks for hiring redundant, unnecessary Indian personnel.

Some of this is due to the incompetence of Indian H-1Bs, where three or more Indians are required to do the same job that one American could do. An insider describes this process at Deloitte:

Deloitte: they start out with an onshore team at the client site. They’ll upsell an executive on ‘inexpensive’ staff augmentation work that is done in India. But if you actually interview the developers they use offshore, for every one good dev lead they introduce to you, they have five other incompetent developers that know nothing. Thus the contracts become more expensive than just hiring a competent white.

But another reason is that bodyshops will lock corporations into bulk contracts that require them to hire hundreds or thousands of Indians at a time in exchange for a discount. The cost of this is that when said Indians complete their projects, instead of ending the contract or transferring them to new projects, corporations like USAA will keep them on payroll and have them either do busywork—the programming equivalent of digging holes and then filling them back in—or no work at all because they cannot fire or reassign the H-1Bs without violating the original bulk contract. Indians in management positions perceive a greater number of employees as proof of success, even if those Indians are more inefficient and incompetent then a smaller number of competent American employees.

Bodyshops are also known to invent fake job titles in order to move more Indians into the U.S. For example, HCLTech employs individuals in “secretary assistance” whose jobs consist entirely of stamping paperwork, while some employers will reclassify lawyers as “law clerks” to avoid paying them a lawyer’s salary. In extreme cases, bodyshops will advise contractors in customer service positions to intentionally leave things broken so there are more support tickets to resolve and thus the contractors look busier. If you’ve ever wondered why it seems like customer service can never solve your problem, this might be why.

This model of labor redundancy not only eliminates any cost savings that corporations realize from employing Indians instead of Americans, it is extraordinarily inefficient and is reminiscent of third world labor market patterns. In poor countries like Mexico or the Philippines, businesses will employ more people then they actually need due to cronyism/nepotism, the low cost of labor in general, and as a bizarre method of social control. As an example, if you step into a Jollibee or McDonald’s in Manila, you will interact with no fewer than four people: a worker who takes your order while you’re in line, the cashier, the person who brings your food to your table, and someone who stands around doing nothing until you stand up to leave, at which point they whisk your trash into the nearest garbage can. In the Mexico City airport, passengers cannot take luggage carts out of the transit zone; they must pay individuals to move their luggage around for them. The city also lacks public trash cans because random people are paid to collect trash and dispose of it. Mexican retailers were slow to adopt self check-out lines (the Walmart near where I lived in Guadalajara only added self-check-out in 2023) and touchscreens for customers are virtually nonexistent because they would make employees redundant.

Bodyshops All the Way Down

Bodyshops operate on a pyramid-like structure in which work and contracts are shuffled around to smaller bodyshops, with the end result that the actual contractors who arrive on site may be several layers removed from the actual bodyshop who contracted with the corporation. It’s a Byzantine mess that blocks accountability and transparency.

It’s very common for dozens or more bodyshops to be registered to the same address, with hundreds of these addresses across the U.S. I recently investigated several of these laptop farm operations in New Jersey and discovered that in many cases, the businesses registered to these addresses are not listed on the buildings’ directories and other employees in the building often don’t know they exist.

The suites themselves also had far fewer personnel then you would expect given the number of businesses allegedly operating out of them.

A Pattern of Abuse

The bodyshop system is enabled by H-1B visas; they exhibit a consistent pattern of illegal and unethical behavior. There is evidence to suggest that Trump’s recent H-1B reforms are putting pressure on their operations. However, there is no reform possible when it comes to this level of entrenched corruption. H-1B visas must be ended in order to end these abuses, and the corporations that facilitated these labor abuses must be given corporate death penalties.

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