The good news came in two, coupled, elements on Friday, December 11:
First, the Economic Policy Institute of Washington, D.C., an advocacy organization dealing with social issues, announced that it had found that one of the big Indian body shops, HCL, cheated its own Indian H-1B employees by an estimated $95 million.
Second, part of the proof of this monster wage theft comes from the use of a fairly new way of citizen-aided enforcement of the immigration laws, by a "qui tam" suit filed against the body shop by a former HCL executive. Qui tam legal actions are based on America’s Civil War-era False Claims Act, designed to allow citizens to help protect the government from grasping contractors.
It rewards informants, like the former HCL executive, with substantial financial rewards if the informant (and the informant’s lawyers) can prove that the government lost money because of corporations’ illegal activities.
The body shop now carries the bland name of HCL, LLC; it used to identify itself more accurately as Hindustan Computers Ltd. It is one of the nation’s largest users of H-1B visas and which bring aliens to the U.S. as temporary, skilled workers. H-1B is a highly controversial program and it has been accused of taking hundreds of thousands of jobs from U.S. workers. HCL and the vast majority of its H-1B workers are from India.
A key segment of the EPI press release follows:
The H-1B...
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