DHS Drops Other Shoe on 'Pretend Employers' Fraud in OPT Program
The Department of Homeland Security has just taken a useful move to deport or deny re-admission to some 4,600 alien college grads who have been abusing the Optional Practical Training program.
The aliens did so by paying a pretend employer to give them "reference letters", which they use to maintain what looks like legal OPT status while working, in fact, for yet another employer, in the latter case illegally.
The news comes from an unlikely source, a press release from a Houston law firm, Reddy & Neumann, which wrote: "4,600 Nonimmigrants Expected to be Deported for Using Fraudulent Experience Letters."
The firm went on that some 100 F-1 "students" (really alumni) "mostly from India, had received a notification from the Mumbai Consulate regarding [their] visa revocation" for this reason.
The scheme, as we reported in October 2018, had been stumbled upon by the FBI as it investigated what it regarded as a national security breach. Then both the NBC-TV affiliate in the Bay Area, and CIS — acting in the same manner, but independently of each other — pointed out that there were other "pretend OPT employers" using the scheme, and making millions in the process.
We identified about a dozen firms that might be in the business by noting their feeble websites and an unusual hiring pattern reported (but apparently not acted upon) by the sleepy arm of ICE that is supposed to regulate international students, the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP). Before discussing the pattern, one must describe the three different parts of the OPT program: there is CPT (Curricular Practical Training) for actual students; there is regular OPT lasting a year for all newly graduated foreign students, and there is the STEM extension of two additional years for aliens with degrees in science, technology, engineering, or math. Routinely, firms that use the graduate elements of the program use the student (CPT) part as well. The suspect firms never used CPT but said they hired hundreds and thousands of OPT and STEM alumni.
https://cis.org/North/DHS-Drops-Other-Shoe-Pretend-Employers-Fraud-OPT-Program