Vishwanatha Badikana, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

President Trump recently cracked down on the H1B visa program, requiring companies to pay $100,000 to sponsor a worker.

The program was originally intended to bring in temporary employees with highly specialized skills that few Americans possessed. H

owever, as the White House proclamation states, the H-1B program “has been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers.”

In practice, it now serves to import general IT and tech workers, displacing Americans and driving down wages.

Investigations have uncovered widespread fraud: fake applicants, forged documents, and shell companies that sponsor visas and then place workers into U.S. firms on contract.

Over the past 30 years, a pattern has emerged in which hiring an Indian HR manager often leads to a steady increase in Indian workers until Americans become a minority in certain departments or entire companies.

Wages are suppressed, discouraging Americans from entering these fields and reinforcing the false claim that there are jobs Americans “won’t” or “can’t” do.

In reality, Americans will take any job if the pay is fair, and proper wages motivate them to pursue training. The proof lies in recent layoffs: in 2022, the top 30 companies brought in 34,000 new H-1B workers even as they cut at least 85,000 staff.

The new Trump policy will reduce the number of new H1B visas issued but does nothing about the roughly 600,000 holders already in the country. The dishonesty and scope of the problem are far greater than most people realize.

Salvatore Militello, who has spent decades in the IT sector as both a technician and later a recruiter, told me in an interview how the H1B program has harmed the industry.

“I started working with Microsoft in around the year 2000. And then I became independent. From 2000 to about 2015 or 2016, there was this trend of bringing people from India over to Microsoft. I would occasionally work on campus, managing these difficult projects for Microsoft. They were called rescue projects.”

He recalled companies claiming they couldn’t find qualified Americans, but he didn’t believe it. “I’m thinking, yes, you can find people.” The reality, he said, was that companies simply didn’t want to pay American wages.

Militello noted that salaries offered to Indian workers were 30 to 40 percent below the market average, which in turn pushed wages across the board downward.

Across the industry, he saw a broader pattern of offshoring tied to H-1B visas.

“They had an offshore team, or they brought a mix of offshore and some of those onshore, which I used to call extended offshore, because that’s what they were with this H-1B business.”

COVID accelerated the trend. Once American employees were forced to work from home, companies found it easier to offshore jobs. Replacing remote U.S. staff with Indians working from India became seamless, and this also opened the door to bringing more Indian workers into the United States on H-1B visas to replace local employees.

According to Militello, the largest drivers of H-1B expansion have been Amazon, Microsoft, and LinkedIn. Amazon filed 10,969 Labor Condition Applications in fiscal year 2024, leading to 10,044 approvals in 2025.

The White House cited similar patterns, noting that one firm was approved for more than 5,000 H-1B visas in 2025 while laying off 15,000 workers, and another cut 2,400 staff in Oregon while securing nearly 1,700 approvals.

Amazon remained the top sponsor, rising from 9,257 approvals in 2024 to 10,044 in 2025, an increase of 787. Other major firms, including Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and JPMorgan Chase, also expanded their H-1B sponsorships.

LinkedIn has played a critical role in fueling this deluge. Evidence shows Indian recruiters use the platform aggressively to promote visa opportunities and connect workers with American companies.

Reports describe more than 14,000 call centers in India, each employing 500 to 1,000 workers with access to LinkedIn, Dice, ChatGPT, and VoIP, and each recruiter given quotas for collecting résumés. At the center of this system is the “bench sales” model.

LinkedIn job searches show hundreds of listings in India for “Sr. Bench Sales Recruiters,” whose role is to market H-1B workers who are between projects and place them in U.S. companies as quickly as possible.

American job seekers are now familiar with aggressive Indian recruiters who contact them with vague offers, demand résumés and personal details, and provide little real information.

These résumés are often harvested to “spice up” Indian candidates’ profiles or to fabricate a paper trail showing that domestic workers were considered and rejected, even though the jobs are reserved for pre-selected H-1B applicants.

This explains why so many Americans are contacted repeatedly about jobs they never hear back on. Fake recruiters use domestic résumés as evidence of unsuccessful screenings, creating the documentation needed for visa fraud.

The business model depends on scale and low costs. Bench recruiters in India may earn about $1,000 per month, while agencies profit from each consultant placed.

Many LinkedIn postings explicitly require knowledge of visa categories (H-1B, OPT, CPT, GC, USC) and emphasize working with visa-holding consultants.

After moving into recruiting, Militello was asked to review résumés from Indian applicants.

“What I found was that applicants would say they were H-1B, but they weren’t. They were here illegally. How do I know? Because I checked.”

When he explained that without a valid visa the company could not sponsor them, applicants often replied, “That’s okay. I have a friend with a corporation in the U.S. You pay the corporation, and they will pay me.”

This was one of many scams.

Shell companies, sometimes listing large numbers of employees on paper, existed only to loan workers out on consultancy contracts to U.S. firms. The shell company, not the worker, received the salary.

To keep costs attractive, the rate charged to the hiring company was below market value, and the shell company took a cut, leaving the worker with only a fraction of the standard pay.

Militello recalled that when the going rate was $100 an hour, Indian workers sometimes ended up with just $60.

In addition to his interactions with job seekers, Militello described the constant outreach from Indian scam recruiters. “We’ve got 20 candidates and their first name is Singh, Amit, Sumit—you get it. Twenty of them.

And then they say, ‘We have these people that need work, do you have any positions open for them?’ You can’t do that. If you have the work, I’m not going to participate.” He shared one such email, which read:

“Hello,
Greetings for the Day!!
This is Ganesh, from Sainar Solutions INC., working as a Bench Sales Recruiter.
We have excellent consultants in our Bench, who are actively looking for projects on C2C/C2H.
Please let me know if you have any suitable requirements. Kindly share me the requirements with…”

The recruiter’s email itself demonstrates multiple violations.

The H-1B program requires a specific job that cannot be filled by an American worker, yet the email shows they had candidates first and were seeking jobs second, exactly the opposite of the law. It also implies the workers were “on the bench,” waiting without pay for placement, another violation of federal rules.

Finally, offering to supply workers through a third-party arrangement raises employer-employee relationship issues, since the sponsoring company may not actually control the worker’s employment.

The H-1B visa scam grew under Obama and exploded under Biden. Now it is being squelched by Trump.

The additional steps the president needs to take are scrutinizing and canceling many of the 600,000 existing H-1B visas, and shutting down the consulting companies and Indian recruiters that enable the system.

Given his speed and thoroughness, the administration may already be working on that.