Here’s a perhaps unorthodox view of a governmental decision not to deport a group of foreign workers who deserved it. Does the government get any credit for its lenient treatment of these recent alien grads of U.S. universities a couple of years ago?
Not at all.
The ones who stayed in the States, as a result of the lenient decision, have since sued the feds seeking H-1B status, while others in the same situation who returned to India were denied visas and remain there. You might say that a soft answer in this case just turned up the wrath of the aliens involved.
Meanwhile the four U.S.-based entities involved in the fraud all seem, appropriately, to be out of business.
Let’s step back several years. As we reported at the time, an unknown but large number of recent alien college grads paid fees to a group of labor brokers to say that they were the employees of the four outfits, but were not in fact employees. This gave the students and alumni seemingly valid credentials as workers in the Optional Practical Training program, and kept their F-1 visas alive.
The whole business was camouflaged as a training program.
The Department of Homeland Security soon ended the illicit program, but did so at a time when some of the aliens involved had returned to India. Many, perhaps all, of them when they sought to renew their visas experienced denials, but their colleagues who stayed in the States remained in the States, usually in illegal status. These individuals were not deported, as they should have been.
All of this comes to mind because some of the former students have decided that they were innocent victims of the scheme and have taken the government to court saying that they really should be granted H-1B status, as reported by Bloomberg News.
Now if all those one-time alien students and alumni had been forced to return to India they would not have access to our courts, but they were not deported at the time.