For decades, the H-1B visa program has been the centerpiece of America’s high-skilled immigration system.
To its defenders, it is a vital pipeline that brings talented workers from around the world to power the U.S. economy. But, to its critics, it is a system rife with abuse—one that can undermine American workers while also trapping foreign workers in exploitative arrangements.
A new book, Wild Wild East: Exiled Americans, Enslaved Indians and the Systemic Abuse of the H-1B Visa Programme, takes readers inside one especially shadowy corner of this world: the universe of so-called “desi consultancies.” These companies—also known as H-1B “body shops”— connect Indian tech workers to American employers through a maze of recruiters, subcontractors, universities, and corporate clients.
The book follows the lives of Indian H-1B seekers, displaced American tech workers, and the firms that profit from a deeply broken system. It is at a story about immigration, labor exploitation, globalization, and the darker side of the U.S.-India tech corridor.
To talk more about the book, Milan is joined on the show this week by its author, Tanul Thakur. Tanul is an award-winning journalist and film critic. In 2015, he won the National Film Award for Best Film Critic—the youngest critic to receive the honor. Wild Wild East is his first book.
Milan and Tanul discuss the latter’s firsthand experience with a “desi consultancy,” the exploitation many H-1B workers endure, and the role U.S. higher education plays in this ecosystem. Plus, the two discuss how Andhra Pradesh and Telangana became the epicenter of H-1B-related fraud and the ways in which the H-1B program can be reformed.
Episode notes:
- Aditya Mani Jha, “The human cost of H1-B dream: Review of Tanul Thakur’s Wild Wild East,” Hindu, June 11, 2026.
- Tanul Thakur, “‘Heads they won, tails he lost’: How ‘desi consultancies’ prey on Indian grads in America,” NewsLaundry, May 24, 2026.
- Anant Gupta, “Indians slam MAGA ‘war’ over H-1B skilled-worker visas as ‘racist,’” Washington Post, January 7, 2025.
The audio of this podcast was optimized using Adobe Podcast Enhancer AI. No alterations were made to the substance of the conversation.
Transcript
Note: this is an AI-generated transcript and may contain errors
Milan Vaishnav Welcome to Grand Tamasha, a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Hindustan Times. I'm your host, Milan Vaishnav. For decades, the H-1B visa program has been the centerpiece of America's high-skilled immigration system. To its defenders, it's a vital pipeline that brings talented workers from around the world to power the U.S. economy. But to its critics, it is a system rife with abuse, one that can undermine American while also trapping foreign workers in exploitative arrangements. A new book, Wild Wild East, Exiled Americans, Enslaved Indians, and the Systemic Abuse of the H-1B Visa Programme, takes readers inside one especially shadowy corner of this world, the universe of so-called Desi consultancies. These companies, also known as H-1B body shops, connect Indian tech workers to American employers through a maze of recruiters, subcontractors, universities, middlemen, and corporate clients. The book follows the lives of Indian H-1B seekers, displaced American tech workers, and the firms that profit from a deeply broken system. It is a story all at once about immigration, labor, globalization, and the darker side of the U.S.-India tech corridor. To talk about the book, I'm joined today by its author, Tanul Thakur. Tanul is an award-winning journalist and film critic. In 2015, he won the National Film Award for best film critic, the youngest critic ever to receive the honor. Wild Wild East is his first book. Tanul, congrats on the book and thanks so much for taking the time.
Tanul Thakur Thank you so much, Milan, for inviting me. It's an absolute pleasure.
Milan Vaishnav So I want to start the same way your book starts by asking you to tell our listeners a little bit about your story. Back in 2010, you were a graduating senior at an American university, and you were doing what most seniors do at that time, which is looking for a job. And you got a call one day from a recruiter who called to say that you had been selected for an analyst position with a starting salary of $60,000 and an H-1B sponsorship. Tell us a little bit about the call and what happened next.
Tanul Thakur Yeah I mean that was really bizarre. As you said I was a student in my final year like most students, I was particularly desperate for a job I mean especially desperate actually because I was an international student, I was on F1 visa which meant I had to find a job very soon after graduating. I had a huge looming education loan of forty thousand dollars and so I had applied to, you know, I mean hundreds of jobs in the last few months and had not received any reply and I was starting to get very, very desperate and then in a very typical, filmy fashion I get a phone call Uh, you know, so there's this recruiter on the line, an Indian woman, I applied to this university through my college's career portal. So, you know, I mean the whole interview began with me, being completely sincere and all of that about like who I am and blah blah blah but very interestingly as you said like in less than five minutes without asking me much about like, you know my specialization, my interests or anything else or any kind of even technical question, she offered me a job. And not just a job, but also a promise of an H1B visa, a job with a salary of $60,000 per year and followed by a green card sponsorship. And, you know, it just sounded too good to be true. And we know like when things sound too good to be truth, they are well. So, I started to get a bit suspicious and I'd heard of this thing called the DC consultancies. So I started to grill her. I mean, I became an interviewer. So, I started to ask her that, like, you know, have you read my resume? Do you know my major? Because this was absolutely—I was an electrical engineering major was about to be and you know, this position was an IT position, it had nothing to do with any of what I'd studied. So, I sort of like, and she did not have a proper answer to any of them. So, then I simply asked her, are you from a Desi consultancy, to which she had said yes. And I said yes, and I understood that what's going on. So, I essentially like cut the call and all of that. And as you said, right, that phone call essentially set the ball rolling. I will never forget her and her call because it essentially swallowed my entire third piece. It made all my beard gray. And I am really, I'm really thankful that this is not on video, you know, so I would say that, yeah, that's how it all began, actually. This was in late 2010. And yeah, I mean, I started to work on the book a few years later, but yeah.
Milan Vaishnav Well, let me ask you about that because you returned to India, you leave the United States a few years later. You began work as a features writer at a film magazine. Tell us a little bit about that transition, working from film writing to narrative nonfiction is not an easy leap to make, but you kind of had this idea of doing a book on these so-called Desi consultancies. I mean tell us about the leap that you made.
Tanul Thakur Yeah, so you know, so I moved to India in the summer of 2013 to essentially follow my passion to be a writer, a film writer to begin with. You know, I mean, and I began working on the book like in 2016, as I said, and it was a long-term narrative nonfiction project. Essentially, I did not have to make an explicit leap, I would say, because my film writing was also in the realm of narrative non-fiction. So, you know, in 2013, in this film magazine that I first got my job at, The Big Indian Picture, I used to do like really long-form magazine pieces, like 6,000 words, 8,000 words, and these are really narrative-driven pieces. You know, a few years down the line in 2016, just before working on the book, I did a few long-term pieces for The Caravan as well. Again, some of them pretty long, like 5,000 or 6,000 words. But all in the realm of cinema though, but like they would follow standards of it like magazine narrative, nonfiction practices. But you know, I mean, I started to crave more, I wanted to experiment more with sort of voice, structure, prose, things like that. And I'd been a huge fan of, you know many American journalists who used to practice this form, right? Like say, right from John Wilsey to Tracy Kidder to Kate Elise to new people like say, Catherine Boo, Matthew Desmond, stuff like that, you know, Adrienne Nicole LeBlanc and all of that. So, I thought that you know…so I essentially wanted to switch, like wanted to do something on say like a larger scale or to tell like a large story and this I had this idea in mind and I thought that like you know let me just give it a shot. So, I would say that's how it sort of like it began, essentially.
Milan Vaishnav So I realized that for some of our listeners, we kind of jumped in using this jargon and lingo that they might not be familiar with. So, for people who don't know the term, you know, help us define what a Desi consultancy is. It's often called an H1B body shop. You know, how do they operate? Where do they fit in in the larger U.S.-India kind of technology labor pipeline?
Tanul Thakur Yeah, essentially, a Desi consultancy is a body, it's an IT body shop that's owned by Desi and excludes and I was exclusively hiring these Desis. Now Desi is a Hindi term, which essentially means people healing from the Indian subcontinent. So as the name says, like, you know, Desi and consultancy, essentially the staffing former moment of the programmer from sometimes they're from bigger firms as well. So, so that's that about basic consultancies. Now, essentially, what these companies do, I mean, since they are primarily staffing firms, usually they don't have any products of their own. They are essentially in the business of supplying in the realm of the H1B program especially, they are in the business of supplying tech workers to clients and these clients could be like be the Fortune 500 firms, say universities. The firms in other sectors, you know, so, and, you know essentially this, the model itself is not wrong. We know that like, they can be good staffing firms. They can be bad staffing firms and things like that. It's essentially like, the way this model has been abused, it's a problem. And, if you ask me how they work, they essentially like you know it's a pretty established subculture, I would say, or essentially like a cult. They have like a few striking commonalities that you essentially wouldn't find in most staffing firms or say in most industries in the world, I would say. So, to begin with, I mean, often lie to H1B workers, I mean potential H1B workers or tech workers in India that they have a job in the US. It's only when they go to the US that they find out that they have essentially been lied [to] or essentially been trafficked from India to the U.S. Then these Desi body shops or Desi consultancies, they lump seven to eight people in a two-bedroom, in a very squalid two- bedroom guest house. I mean, they call it a guest house, you know, it's extremely dirty. It's extremely cramped with seven or eight like really desperate Indian H1B workers. Then they make these H1B workers fake their resumes. They ask them to inflate their resumes with seven to eight years of experience when they can't find jobs, because well, I mean you can't find jobs if you don't have like that much experience. You know, after a month long training, month long training is training is another like a feature striking feature of this ecosystem, they arrange something called a proxy interview. So somebody else gives an interview on your behalf and you find a job. Then while at the job, if you don't have the technical acumen to you know do that job properly, there's something called on the job support. So, you know it's essentially like think of dc consultancies as like the best and the biggest techno jugard and jugard for non-Indian listeners as well a quick fix i need to be really charitable to be …
Milan Vaishnav I think the official definition is frugal innovation.
Tanul Thakur Lovely, lovely. I love that. I had not thought of that, but absolutely right. So that happens. Then all this is still like the fun part of it, in quotes, right? I mean, you know, kind of like, it sounds a bit subversive, cheeky, it's a little funny, but then it starts to get really dark. I mean because then we're talking about rampant wage theft. We are talking about psychological devastation at a level that still makes me shudder. I mean, your salary often delayed, the other side, like, you know, this rampant wage theft, I mean, your purchase order gets edited, the deportation threats, legal intimidation, all of these things start to happen. And like, given that you are so beholden to like, your visa sponsor or your employer, which is in this case, a Desi consultancy, you often don't protest these working conditions. So, you know, you start to live like a very double life, quite literally, right? Because you're somebody else quite literally at the job or at the client side. Yeah. You said that you are seven years of experience and all of that. But you come back home and you have this dude like who is talking to somebody over Skype or Webex to get your job done. So, this is what their larger model is, I would say.
Milan Vaishnav So Tanul, just help us understand at a different level, right? I mean, OK, you have the Metas and the Apples and the Teslas and the Googles. We know what those are, what they look like. Then you have a set of Indian IT consulting firms, the TCSs the Cognizants, so on and so forth. Now, where do this class of firms or companies fit in in that broader landscape?
Tanul Thakur Thank you so much for asking. I think this is very, very perfectly encapsulated. It will also give like the viewers listeners [context]. So, it’s good you mentioned that. So, I mean, we can think of like the whole H1B scenario, right, like as a pyramid. I mean in the way like the hiring happens and in the way like these parties are implicated or their levels of like involvement in perpetuating this and one can think of this pyramid as a four-tier pyramid. So, on the bottom are the body shops or Desi consultancies. Above them, as you said, are Indian outsourcing giants, they are often called prime vendors. Above them like corporate America, which of course includes big tech giants, but also all other kinds of firms as well, right? Like insurance, pharmaceutical, aviation, whatever. And last is, I mean, American federal agencies, who also hire a lot from also hire a lot of H1B workers. So the way they are placed at the level of their culpability, they are at the very bottom in the sense that like, it's not at the level of culpabilty, let me just call it at the level of hiring, right? So, so let's say there is a client which wants to hire like an H1B worker. And it doesn't have or it doesn’t want to like hire a worker permanently. So essentially what it would do is it would say contact an outsourcing giant which is called the prime vendor as I said and if they have H1B workers, they supply those H1B workers to the client. Oftentimes or many times, let's say, they don't. So, then they would ask another vendor like you know like a middle vendor if they have them to supply and they become like a part of the hiring chain. So, in such a case, we have a client followed by a prime vendor followed by one or two vendors or maybe none. Then there is a Desi consultancy, which is essentially sponsoring a visa for an H1B worker who ultimately goes to the end client and performs related services. So this is how a) the hiring chain happens and b) like, this is high. You know, this pyramid also looks like in terms of like, these are like interconnected tiered parties. Of course, there's also a case of like direct action behind us, where like, you know, of course, basic consultancies or outsourcing giants don't come. Like you work for Google, it's sponsored, then it shouldn't be for you. And you work for sure. So
Milan Vaishnav But I mean, you know, to our listeners, right, I think there's, and this is something that I thought I also had in the book, which is like, okay, I realize this isn't a good analogy. But I mean, say you go to a restaurant, and this restaurant doesn't handle its food properly and people end up getting sick. And a bunch of people post that on TripAdvisor or Google reviews, people will stop going to the restaurant. If you work with some kind of construction company that does a really shoddy job, eventually the word will get out, right? So, here you have these body shops, questionable practices, bringing people on who have faked resumes, don't have the skills. Why are they not ostracized? Why do they remain in the game as opposed to being left kind of outside of the fence?
Tanul Thakur Absolutely, right. So, I mean, in that level, then the culpability, like, you know, or the responsibility or the accountability really lies with the folks or the entities, actually, who are really getting benefited by this, which is to say, like the end clients. In many cases, there are no checks and balances. I remember there was a 2014 Guardian piece in which, which had exposed some of these body shop related practices. And it has spoken to I think Apple for sure and a few other big clients. I think Cisco was also there and all of that. And essentially they've said, I mean you find that. And something I also discovered that I mean there is no proper vetting, there are no like largely checks and balances as to like you know… because oftentimes you have cases where there are body shops that have been like heavily penalized by the Department of Labor yet they still continue to be, they still continue to supply labor to a lot of these big firms. So essentially, I think it's a matter of, you know, I mean, who gets really benefited from it and which is to say like I mean to begin with corporate America and they wield disproportionate amount of clout in terms of like continuing the H1B should be programmed the way it is. Also closely followed by the laxity of the Department of Labor in kind of like, you know, detecting and kind of penalizing these bad apples, because even when they are debarred from the H&B program, which is very rare for a year, many times, I mean, during that period, they open companies under a false name or a different name address and all of that, and they continue the same process. Essentially, so it's a bunch of factors, but I think the prominent one being, I mean, as long as, you know, it works fine for everyone involved and everyone gets to like reap huge amounts from it, people really don't have a problem. Also, I mean, at least to begin with, although I don't think it's true any longer because I mean these cases have been really out in the open over the last few years, at least for a very long time, this kind of like functioned as a hidden world, you know, because this was so connected or confined within the Indian diaspora. And because H1B workers were also like, you know, both victims but also perpetrators in the sense that you know… so everybody had like an incentive to keep this other secret, I would say. But of course that doesn't absolve like parties who should have done the right thing, but they did not.
Milan Vaishnav So I want to just ask you to say a word about the three protagonists of the book. The book, I should say, follows three individuals and their stories, and of course, their encounters. They all have slightly different roles in the system. The characters are named Virgil, Kumar, and Manu. Tell us a little bit about each of them and maybe why you chose to tell the story of the H1B system, the underbelly of the H1B system through their lives.
Tanul Thakur Yeah, so Virgil is a 68-year-old IT worker who has tried to find an IT job for the last 20 years and has largely failed to find one. He worked in the US Navy from 1976 to 1982. He hails from a small Texan town called Harper and after ’82, he basically learned coding on his own and then he entered the IT industry in 1988. There he found stunning success. He first worked for like $25 an hour for the first six years to ‘94 then his earnings flowed from 25 to 45 to 67.5 dollars in 2003. But after that project ended, well, everything did, because he simply stopped getting any interview calls. He applied to like hundreds and thousands of jobs. He revised his resume more than 100 times. Nothing happened. He lost homes, partners, friends, optimism, identity, dignity. You know, I mean, it was very bleak for him. So, years later in 2007, according to virtually using first grade math, he created a website called Keep America at Work, wanting to find the villains of his life. Now Kumar is somebody, you know who went to… he was a bachelor of arts graduate …he got a BA degree in 1995. Then for the next 12 years, he toiled for what he called his dream America. And like you know, so he applied to F1 and H1B multiple times got rejected nothing really happened. And then he moved to the US in 2008 to work for a small IT body shop in New Jersey thinking that that is life was set. In New Jersey, he found something that a lot of Indian H1B workers do, which is that he did not have a job. He found out about the cartel of Desi consultancies, fake resumes, proxy interviews, all of those things. So, it was interesting that Kumar was when he was in India, he used to call himself or think of himself actually as a Hindu fundamentalist Brahmin. And he used think that like, so the big proponent of Hindutva, the BJP and all of that, India shining narrative and everything, and thought that like you know, did not think very positively of the West. It's only when he comes to the US, he finds a very different side of Indian brethren. And so, he gets fed up of all of that and in 2013, he creates a YouTube channel to expose the sordid industry and all of that. And Virgil and Kumar, they sort of meet later in the story and they understand that, you know, they should not be adversaries, but allies. Now Manu is the third character, unrelated to Virgin and Kumar, also the youngest of the lot. He moved to the U.S. In 2008 to study at this college called the University of Bridgeport, where he did his, to do his master's in electrical engineering. He was this very, he was this shy iridescent kid who had seen like horrific times as a kid, like, you know, his family was very abusive to him. He had a very sad childhood, actually. In fact, he used to call his family Hitler family, you know, so he basically like his whole bid was to escape the tyranny of his own family and sort of like the tyranny of the Indian condition itself. He thought America would be a good place little did he know that he had escaped one set of abusers to collide into another set of abusers all the way in the US and those abusers were also Indians. So, these are the three protagonists that kind of underpinned the narrative portion of the book. But you know, I mean, I did not find these protagonists as much as they found me, which is to say that I had a very different conception of this book back in 2016. I actually wanted to go to the US, I wanted to spend a year or so following or shadowing a few H1B workers, but that couldn't happen because I was in India, visa restrictions and all of that. And later the lockdown. So, I contacted many H1B workers, like, you know, to profile them, to interview them and all of that, and nobody agreed. And some even dissuaded me from working on the book. And I can understand, you know when your employment is tied to your immigration status, you wouldn't really like blow the whistle or anything. But then I mean, Kumar was this one rare, courageous person who has a YouTube channel, who still does have a YouTube Channel. So, I stumbled onto it. I spoke to Kumar and he agreed to be a part of the book. He then introduced me to Virgil. And so, I got those two protagonists like that. Manu I found on my own. So essentially this book changed its tenor from being a piece about, you know, surviving the H1B program to fighting the H1B program. And I wanted somebody like Manu as well. I could have just written a book on Virgil and Kumar. But because Kumar had followed this H1B pipeline, which is to say that he studied in India, went to the US on an H1B, and I knew that there was rampant abuse in F1, OPD, and all of those programs, I also wanted somebody who had gone to an American university. So in that case, Manu was great. So, I thought that given all the restrictions and all finding a suitable protagonist, I thought this was a good approach of like, you know, understanding both the economic and the psychological cost of the H1B program, where you have like a displaced American techie, where you had like an H1B worker in a Desi consultancy and you also have like, a student who goes to an American college, then graduates from there, goes to a consultancy and essentially what happens to them after that.
Milan Vaishnav I mean, I just want to clarify one thing that has come up a couple of times in this conversation, which is, I think most people have the impression, including myself, that you get a job, you're offered a job, that employer sponsors your H-1B. That job comes with a salary. But that's not really what you're describing in this book. I mean these are people who have a job on paper, but it all depends on client work. That client work could happen, it could not. You could go long stretches without client work. The pay is not really guaranteed. And in any case, your body shop may take a pretty fat cut of whatever you eventually make. So, I guess how within the confines of the regulatory arrangements around H-1B are these body shops able to survive given that there really is no job and there really no salary floor, which I thought was supposed to be a fundamental part of the program?
Tanul Thakur Yeah, absolutely. Right. And that's where it kind of like the whole sordid reality of this underbelly comes in. I mean, and I said something earlier in a chat, which is to say that in a lot of cases, these H1B workers are both victims and perpetrators, something similar is happening here. So, for example, as you very rightly said, right, that I mean, one of the biggest or I mean the fundamental criterion for an H1B visa is that you need to have a job and not just a job with a stable salary but that your employer is I mean, the law mandates the employer to pay the H1B during all non-productive hours as well, which in colloquially which colloquial in the IT ecosystem is called the bench period. So in a lot of cases, of course, these are temp positions, these are short-term contracts, and all of that. In many times, H1B workers don't have projects. But in those cases, the employers or, say, Desi consultancies don't pay them. In fact, not just don't paid them, they ask them to pay the employer's tax during that bench period because they have to comply with the rules of the H1B program. So they have to keep running the payroll to create a facade of, you know, that like we are compliant with the law and everything else. So, in that case, I mean, H1B workers themselves help cover them dirty traits. I mean you know so there oftentimes is like a very tacit sort of arrangement with their own employers. Because I mean, what option do they have? I mean short, they can leave the US and all of that.
Milan Vaishnav Otherwise, they're kind of trapped into this arrangement where it is a kind of servitude of a sort, but at the same time, the option is exit. The option is not get another job.
Tanul Thakur Absolutely. So, you know, I mean, this is one major way that, you know, this fraud of this exploitation is both like hidden, covered and also like perpetuated, I would say.
[…]
Milan Vaishnav You mentioned earlier that one of the reasons that you wanted to profile Manu was the fact that he went to an American university. And, you know, I think one of the features of this book that's just so interesting is how many institutions are simultaneously implicated in this kind of fraud, right? So you have consultancies, you have universities, you have staffing firms, you've corporations, you have government agencies. Let me ask you a bit about higher education, right, because he goes to this school called University of Bridgeport, which I'm guessing most of our listeners have not heard of before. You know, what kind of an establishment is this? It's not the only one, by the way, you talk about many others, which I also hadn't heard about, but what is a place like the University of Bridgeport offering? What's their role in this kind of tangled web?
Tanul Thakur Yes. So, you know, a school like the University of Bridgeport, it essentially greases the wheels for an H1B applicant. You know, so I mean, so there are many students in India like who have, who get very low GRE and TOEFL scores, but they still do want to go to the US and like their ultimate aim is not F1, but an H1B visa, you know, but like, but how do you, how do get there? I mean, not many companies are, will sponsor an H-1B visa. So, the F1 visa becomes like an easier alternative.
Milan Vaishnav Which is just a kind of classic no-frills student visa.
Tanul Thakur Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's a straightforward student visa. It gives you like an opportunity to work under the OPT program, which in 2008, the duration increased to 17 months. I mean, the extensions duration in 2016, it became 24 months. So essentially, you get like 36 months to sort of like work in the US if you have an employer and all of that.
Milan Vaishnav Right and just I want to be sure I think a lot of our listeners will know this but for those who don't know OPT is optional practical training and it means that after you finish your studies, you can stay on for a period of time. I believe the duration varies if you have a STEM degree versus a non-STEM degree, but it essentially allows you to get practical work experience without necessarily being on a sponsored visa. So it's kind of a bridge that takes you from a student visa to potentially an H-1B or something else.
Tanul Thakur Thanks for this very helpful explanation, Milan. While talking, I sometimes forget that there are no-
Milan Vaishnav No, no, no. I mean, I think these are these are terms that I think many of us use, but I think, you know, part of what this book does is demystifies the whole process. I wanted to make sure that people understood that.
Tanul Thakur No, no, no. Thank you so much. Actually, sometimes I get so carried away, I forget that there are no endnotes while you're talking. So, thanks. Absolutely. As you said, right. So now, you know, this kind of intent and this kind of means which is to say intent of the F1 worker or F1 student sorry and intent is like, say, a school like the Bridgeport, right? It kind of like really transforms even the existing education, educational visa pipeline, because essentially a lot of these schools, they have tie-ups with Indian educational consultancies who know the intent of these workers. And a lot of times these are I mean really like dishonest slash corrupt educational consultancies. So, they often push students to lower ranked universities because they get a higher cut. So now in this case the pipeline sort of becomes like Indian student, Indian educational consultancy, a second or a third tier American college I mean, by the F1 visa, OPT and the H1B. So that's one. You know, I'll just like to take like a minute or two extra to kind of like say that like, you know, as you said, right, like when it comes to the higher education, entities like the University of Bridgeport are actually, you know, small fish. I mean, it's actually like the real elite American colleges that get them to benefit as well from the H1B program because you know and it shouldn't be as kind of really become this academia industrial complex because I mean a lot of foreign students want to ultimately work in the US. F1 is great for that. They pay higher tuition fees than their domestic counterparts, you know. So, a lot of colleges benefit heavily from their associations with industry. You have corporate donations, you have like, you know, in form of adult professorial chairs, lab equipment, stuff like that. Few people actually know that there was a backdoor deals between industry and academia in 2000. Like before 2000, the H1B act, which essentially the tech lobbies told academia or American universities that you support are support us like championing a higher annual cap for H1B and we will ensure that you know you get H1B workers at unlimited H1B workers and like an academia level salary. So, in that case as well there is a material benefit as well so you know
Milan Vaishnav And I think it's worth pointing out, sorry, just sorry to interrupt you, that while there is a statutory cap for the number of H-1B visas that can be issued every year, that cap exists for private firms. If you're a university or say a 501c3 nonprofit, you are not subject to an H-1B cap.
Tanul Thakur Yes, absolutely. Right. Which is why when people say that the H1B cap is 85,000, 20,000 reserved for master students, it actually ends up being something like 120,000 or 125,000 every year, stuff like that. Right? Also, I mean, even though universities are exempted from the annual cap and like, you know, they can set their own pay scales and everything, they also hired from like a lot of shady desi consultancies. Some of them so bad that they have been like, heavily, I mean, they've had to pay heavy back wages to their workers. They've been involved in class action lawsuits. They have litany of complaints about them on immigration forums and stuff like that. But I think the most important thing, or maybe the most vicious thing, actually for me the most heartbreaking thing American academia does is, it's something I tried to do actually when it was at a fever pitch in the early aughts about different legislations coming and all of that, is that it subtly tries to mold the public perception… because university heads are so reputed, they're supposed to bat for the right thing. I mean, that's what academia is about, right? So when they write op-eds, when they go on these different news channels and they talk about the possible expansion of the H1B program, that has an outsized influence, I think. And it, for me, was a bit heartbreaking to find that level of disingenuous.
Milan Vaishnav So I, so Tanul, let me just, I mean, I think, here's something that I kind of struggle with, right? It's like I have somebody who, who studies the Indian diaspora. I've written a little bit on immigration and I'm a big believer that America is fundamentally country of immigrants and that we've benefited enormously. I certainly wouldn't be here unless my parents could have immigrated from India and the many decades ago. And, you know, most of, or many, I should say, of the kind of peer-reviewed kind of academic studies show that there is a boost to economic dynamism in the United States on account of skilled worker visa programs and so on and so forth. There's a geopolitical backdrop to this, of course, which is the U.S. is locked into this kind of the 21st century competition with China, which revolves around critical emerging technologies like AI and quantum. And so on and so forth. So, there is this larger backdrop. So, I guess just to kind of reframe this slightly, you've given us a very dark picture of the kind of fraud and shadiness and shady operators and almost kind of slavery-like conditions, right, that people work in. How do you square these two realities, right? Which is one which is about this American economic boom. Being at the cutting edge of innovation, relying on immigrant entrepreneurs, immigrants who take out patents, immigrants who do cutting edge R&D, and on the other hand, this very disturbing story of people who are scamming the system or who may get embroiled in a scam without even knowing it in the first instance.
Tanul Thakur Absolutely. Thank you so much for asking this actually, because I mean, this has become such a politically detonating, I mean it's become a political minefield actually, especially over the last few years. My stance on this is absolutely blindingly simple. I mean I don't have a problem with immigration at all actually. I think immigration is one of the most fundamental human impulses. I think it's one of the most beautiful human impulses, you know, I've been a beneficiary of like, you know, the American immigration system. In fact, like, if people ask me, I would I credit my college, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for me becoming a writer because I saw some great engineers there and I realized that. So, you don't mean why do these things happen in like in real immigration? My brother is an H1B worker right now. So, you know, I mean, of course, I get that and it's a very fair question to ask. But it's also, you know, you also have to like take into account what's happening, I mean, both in the host industry, sorry, host country, which is to say the US here, US in this case. And also, I mean, the quality of immigrants that are coming into the country and for what reason, right? I mean, one of the biggest reasons the way this policy was sold to the American public was through the stem crisis and all of that. That largely has not been the case. But even if we leave that aside for a second,
Milan Vaishnav I mean, sorry, meaning has been the case, meaning that there's been a lot of talk about a STEM crisis in terms of shortage of qualified individuals to do whatever be semiconductor engineers or do quantum computing or and so forth. So you say that's largely been overblown?
Tanul Thakur Yes. Yeah. And I can come to that in a bit. But what I was saying was that, you know, I mean, we sort of like, I think that that makes me come to the point, which I just made earlier, which I'll elaborate on a bit now is, I made the quality of immigrants or in this case, guest workers who become immigrants later, that quality actually has not been very good over the last, I mean quite some time, actually. I mean, these consultancies have existed, like, right from the inception of the H1B program. And then you have that kind of a system, which kind of like preys on, you know, vulnerable people. And in many cases, like those vulnerable people do not have like the skills to do the job, like you know, because which is sadly evidenced by like the preponderance of say fake resumes, proxy interviews and all of that. And it's not like say 10, 15, 20 H1B workers in a year, like it's thousands of H1B workers because there are thousands of Desi consultancies in the US and I'm just talking about Desi consultancy. They're also like Indian outsourcing giants. There are also like ways to support like the hiring process in which corporations get to benefit from it as opposed to like, you know, people who are getting benefited. In fact, like, this abuse of the H1B program, nothing hurts the abuse of the H1B program more than the sincere and honest H1B workers themselves. I know people like a cousin of mine, he had to like move to Canada, I mean, because well, his H1B petition just wouldn't get picked in a lottery year after year. So, you know, I mean there are many, many examples. So now especially coupled with what has been the state for American IT workers for a very long time. You've had corporations firing American workers and asking them to train the replacements, which are the H1B workers. Now, of course, AI has come in, which is, which is spawning its own narrative in terms of replacement and all of that. So, so, you know, when you have like this kind of a complicated scenario where it is a program which has a very good intent, but it has been sort of like, you know, being abused or for the lack of, sorry to sound like Tarantino, where one has been bastardized for like really nefarious means, right? Like for corporate ends. And it's essentially not largely not helping H1B workers. It's not helping American workers. Then we need to sort of like pull the curtain on it and ask ourselves, who does it really benefit? And, you know, and in that case, what should be the extent of high-skilled immigration to the US?
Milan Vaishnav Right. So, I will come back to this in a second towards the end, but I just want to ask you a question about the kind of criminal justice system and the cracking down. In 2013, in the book, you talk about a case in which US federal prosecutors accused Infosys of systemic visa fraud. Since then, that was almost, you know, 13 years ago. How seriously has US law enforcement cracked down on the kinds of practices that you describe in your book?
Tanul Thakur So, yeah, I mean, so the US law enforcement and the action has been very, very lax, definitely till 2013, very relaxed, actually. It's crazy. But after 2013, there have been some improvements, not a whole lot, but definitely some improvements. In fact, even if you see this 2013 Infosys case, wherein it paid 34 million dollars to the US government, like a record amount, that actually also did not come about as independent say enforcement or investigation. That came out because an American whistleblower sort of like you know came out and said. And one wished that like you know there were there were more enforcement actions because you would see then some very fascinating and disconcerting narratives. In 2017 Infosys paid one million dollars to the state of New York to settle visa fraud allegations and it really limited its 2013 settlement which is it was alleged that like you know it was importing folks on B1 which is to say tourist visas and all of that are making them work full time and everything else. In 2020, Facebook paid the Department of justice [who] sued Facebook for discriminating against America techies and for like favoring i mean h1B workers through essentially like a feature of the cream kakar program i won't get into that now uh Facebook had to pay around like 14.5 billion dollars as a settlement. In 2023, Apple had to pay 25 million dollars as a settlement amount for doing the same thing like discriminating against American techies to like give preferential treatment to American sorry to H1B workers. Now, if you like take a look at the work in our divisions database, which is essentially an investigative arm of like the DOL, which has the names of all these companies who have paid back wages for H1B violations and all of that, you will find some fascinating insights. You will find that, yeah sure, there are tech companies, but there are whole other kinds of companies as well. There are state government agencies, there are restaurants, there are beauty suppliers, there are tire makers, there are plastic bottle manufacturers, there essentially schools. In fact, the biggest penalty or the biggest back wages paid in the H1B program is not a tech company. It's not a company at all. In fact, it's a public school district, George County's public schools in Baltimore. I think it had paid 4.2 million dollars as back wages to 1,046 H1B workers for not paying them like, you know, required wages in 2010. So yeah, I mean every year like you do get like a few enforcement actions which nets like, you know a few million dollars in back wages, but given the quantity of abuse in it in the H1B. It is nearly absolutely not enough.
Milan Vaishnav I want to ask you about the flip side of this, right? Which is one of the things that comes out through the books and through some of your reporting in India. I mean, we talked a lot about your reporting in the United States, but it's reporting done in India as well, which is in the states, particularly the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, this region has been a kind of epicenter for H1B fraud. Tell us a little bit about what's happening on that side and whether Indian authorities have taken any steps to crack down on maybe some of these desi consultancies who are engaged in malpractice.
Tanul Thakur Yeah, so, that’s fascinating, actually, because I came to Andhra Pradesh and Telangana purely by accident. When I started to work on the book, I did not know that those states were the ones who had like a disproportionate representation in the H1B fraud. But, I mean, there are a few reasons for that. One is that they essentially had the first movers advantage. I mean by the late 70s, there was already a sizable presence in the U.S. Who still who's. Primarily doctors but like through chain migration they sponsor green cards for their folks and all of that so by the time like say you have like the early 90s or the late 90s which is to say like the edge inception of the H1B and the y2k boom unless these folks are already here and like disproportionate numbers as compared to like folks uh Indian people from other states and of course like so the bad apples among them become like particularly conspicuous. Second is like, you know, besides from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana folks, besides economic incentive, there is also another incentive, which I think is as important like, you know because how many states can say that or boast of visa temple? Well, Hyderabad can, like Chilkur Balaji, you know, I mean, there is there is this huge fixation. There is this whole US in those two states is not just geography. It's prestige. So, you know, it's prestige. and so like, so on one level of economic incentive, it supplemented by whatever to call as image making or myth making, you know, that is also something that like prohibits a lot of folks, a lot of Telugu people from going back to like India. Third is also like, you know, in the 90s, you had like a chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, I mean, who was so drunk on the neoliberal kool-aid that he used to call himself the CEO of Andhra Pradesh. You know, I mean of course that also had like, a part.
Milan Vaishnav You're talking here[inaudible] Who's back in power?
Tanul Thakur Yeah, I saw it! You know, and if you also like to look at the history of the technical education landscape like Andhra Pradesh is one of the few states besides Maharashtra and Karnataka to prioritize higher education through say like we have many caste-based trusts and all of that. So the late 90s under like under the ages of Chandrabahu Naidu you have a lot of these colleges engineering colleges mushrooming which are not particularly great quality but so you know a bunch of these convergences happen to sort of make this possible but let me tell you this. I mean, in my research, what I have found that anybody from any Indian state, who has gotten a chance to kind of like scam the system, they have absolutely scammed the system and it makes complete sense because scam is an equal opportunity employer, like everybody wants to scam stuff. Look, you know, so in fact, it's not just Indians, there's a reason it's called, you know, Desi consultancies and not Indian consultancies, you My reporting has told me through Manu and Kumar's experiences that there are many Nepalese in it as well. Nepalese call it dhoti consultancies. Dhoti is a sarong, I mean for non-Hindi people. You know, there are cases of like where a body shop is owned by a Pakistani and it implies a disproportionate amount of Indians. A body shop owned by an Indian implies a disproportional amount of Pakistanis. Now, what better example of Aman Ki Asha can we find, right? You have Sri Lankan body shop folks. I mean, of course, Indians really, really, really dominate the scene and make no mistake about that. But, you know, it would be wrong to kind of say that it's only Andhra Pradesh or Telangana people. Of course, the numbers are high, of which I think these reasons can be fairly attributed to.
Milan Vaishnav Yeah, I want to kind of bring this conversation to an end by asking you to reflect on something you put in the author's note at the very end of the book, right, which is the, I think gets at the kind of “so what?” question or “so what do we do about this?” question, right? And, and you write that look, the H1B program doesn't play it straight. It's not even close to playing it straight, but on the other hand, you have a Trump administration, a second Trump administration, which, like many other right-wing movements around the world, have really made it very difficult, if not impossible, to have a good faith debate or conversation about immigration. So, I guess, you know, asking a little bit now to kind of think as a think tanker or as a policy wonk, you know. What do you, where do you think the solution lies, right? I mean, you talked earlier is that there, you know, immigration is a beautiful thing. There are many deserving people, there are needs in the United States, there are jobs, there are qualified people, and yet there's a lot of scams that are being perpetrated under the guise of all of these good things. How do we achieve the right equilibrium?
Tanul Thakur Yeah, so I mean, for me, first and foremost, the Department of Labor must reform is prevailing wage levels. So currently, it's essentially a four-tiered system, where level one corresponds to the 17th percentile of the wages for a particular occupation in an area. Level 2 corresponds to 34th percentile, level 3 the 50th, and level 4 the 67th percentiles. Now, H1B program has for long been used as a tool for cheap labor. Now on one hand, as you said, like corporate America folks like to say that, like, you know, they use H1B workers because they are the best and the brightest. And also, I mean, simultaneously talk about the STEM crisis and something that can't be satiated by the demand that can't be satiating by the domestic market. Yet on the same level, these same corporations are paying wages that are much below the local median wage. So for me, the first step would definitely would be to raise the wage ceiling by making level one at least the 50th percentile of the local wages. I think that would go a long way in culling these very anti-worker practices that these corporations do in lieu of enriching their own coffers. So even if, say, the enforcement is weak and given that there are so many bad players, but given that you would really pay a deserving amount for a deserving candidate, that perhaps like be a death knell for many, many of these consultancies. Like law enforcement actions may not even be required in many cases. Second, I would like to think or say is that you know, now just like the green card process where it's employees are required to do a labor market test to see if a suitable US worker is available for the job, that part should be mandatory for the H1B program as well. Right now, employees have to mainly do attestations and even those vanish if they pay an H1B worker more than $60,000. Now, $60k was not close to genius level salaries even in 1998 when this was enacted. But that threshold figure has absolutely not moved a cent in the last 28 years. So that threshold should absolutely be abolished. And the labor market test should actually be mandatory so that American workers are not being disadvantaged. Third I would say is that you know H1B workers must own their visas. I think this is very critical because the very fact that like H1B workers don't own their visas, their employers do, it has created an indentured servitude kind of a system when I mean it's sort of its ripple effects are in several quarters. I mean many times H1B workers don't get fair pay because I mean obviously there is this restriction and all of that the labor mobility is severely curtailed. Second, I mean because their employers own the visas they can't even complain for fear of retaliation. So you know I mean if you make H1B workers like free agents in the market. So if I said at the last point that corporations love H1B workers because they're cheap labor, corporations also are H1B workers because they can be unfree labor. So this combination of cheap and unfree labor really taps into the entitlement that a lot of corporations have, that we are entitled to a certain kind of labor without question. They won't say that removing, so the prevailing rich definition as it is written right now, it has a lot gaping loopholes. So essentially like companies and using those loopholes, companies can essentially unlooping an HMB worker while being fully compliant with the law. And this is very critical to understand that, like, you know, because DC body shop fiends may have abused the law, but similarly, giants have simply changed the law. So, you, I mean, so, and then at least four, at least four gave a new post, but I'll just talk about two of them. The Department of Labor allows firms to set salaries in terms of prevailing wages. So they're essentially given like a plethora of options of wage service that they can choose from and one of them includes wage service by private companies which are often like quite beneficial to these corporations. Second is that like you know a prevailing wage is dependent on the job not the worker. So, in many cases corporations can like underclassify a position fill it with a highly classified highly qualified worker and also save tons of money. You know, the program should also be informed in such a way that like, you know, that the accountability, something that you'd asked me earlier in a chat, should also rest with clients. So right now, I mean, you visa sponsors have to attest that H1B workers don't adversely affect American workers. This requirement should also be extended to American clients because there have been many cases where H1B from consulting companies or outsourcing giants, they work for clients who essentially fire American workers and ask them to train their H1B workers. This has happened in Disney, Southern California, Disney, Toys R Us. The university of California like who's president Janet Napolitano was once like the secretary of department of homeland security like all the science level fiction stuff. So, you know i mean so it's that kind of like so if this the accountability is increased at the level of like clients then they have to either like say both and seniors or they have to also be accountable that like you know and actually workers at their places even contracting or sub-contracting situations don't adversely affect American workers, that would also be, I think, quite good. There should definitely be a minimum preview language for F1 OPTs. Right now, there is none. After 2016, I mean, there is this one, like, little servers that they have to pay, like a common set, like whatever, to correspond to American workers. But I mean it's, again, just, I will start out, law. H4 Indies, H4 are the wives of, sorry, spouses of H1B workers, wives or husbands of H1B workers who can work in the US but again, no prevailing wage requirement. I think that's important because they're also becoming a larger part of the labor pool. I would say the recent wage-based lottery is actually a much welcome change, which I hope will curb some H2B abuse. And actually, I mean, these are some pressing concerns and reforms, I think, which implemented would go a long way in sort of ensuring that the H1B program functions in the right spirit, which is that it truly invites the best and the brightest foreign workers to the country and not, as can also be the case right now, cheap and unfree labor, who will truly complement and not replace US workers.
Milan Vaishnav My guest on the show this week is the author, Tanul Thakur. He is the author of a brand new book called Wild Wild East Exiled Americans Enslaved Indians and the systemic abuse of the H-1B visa program. Akash Kapoor, who's an author and a professor at Princeton had this to say about the book, “What begins as the pursuit of a better future unspools into a gripping tale of scams, broken promises and impossible choices. Rendered with the pace of a thriller and the intimacy of a novel. This is a moving, deeply human and empathetic portrait of a topic that is too often simplified and turned into fuel for demagoguery.” Tanul, thanks so much for joining us on the show this week.
Tanul Thakur Thank you so much Milan for having me, it was a pleasure.
