FOIAzona

The Trump administration announced Friday that it is investigating potential abuses of the H-1B visa system, including concerns raised by this blog.

Earlier this year, FOIAzona obtained hundreds of pages of internal records from the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) after learning that H-1Bs were being misused in order to push diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideology on American citizens.

The internal records were detailed Labor Condition Applications (LCAs) filed by corporations, public colleges, and other entities seeking to fill DEI positions with foreign nationals. Employers are required to file LCAs, which are then either certified or rejected by DOL, before petitioning for the actual H-1Bs from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

Employers who filed these LCAs included Snapchat (“Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives Program Manager”), Oregon State University (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Development Specialist”), and the Springfield Park District (“Diversity Equity Inclusion Coordinator”), among countless others.

I then attempted to obtain copies of the actual H-1B petitions from USCIS, but the agency’s FOIA backlog has remained virtually unchanged for several months.

So, I shared the internal records with a handful of elected officials, including the Office of U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican who has been a real leader on this issue. I also shared my findings that, according to some basic open-source research, a number of the DEI-related H-1B holders appeared to be performing jobs that were different than those listed on their LCAs. Senator Schmitt subsequently wrote a letter about the records to USCIS Director Joseph Edlow and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, which you can read here.

On Friday, DOL confirmed that it is now conducting “at least 175 ongoing investigations” into H-1B matters, including findings that “workers were unaware of the jobs they were supposedly assigned to perform as laid out in the applications.”

This is a commendable start to what I hope will become a widespread criminal investigation into a visa system that undermines American workers through abuse, misconduct, and corruption. I will update the blog with any relevant news in the future.

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