Team Trump’s anti-fraud campaigns are setting their sights on work-visa abuse — and not a moment too soon.
Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance and Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito announced the launch of “a major investigation” meant to “combat fraud and human trafficking” in the H-1B visa program.
Labor officials have already fired off dozens of subpoenas as part of the probe.
D’Esposito told The Post that countless H-1B visas, which let employers hire highly skilled foreigners for positions they can’t fill with US citizens, have gone to fraudsters who’ve scammed “hundreds of millions” of dollars from the medical industry alone.
Team Trump’s focus on government-related grift — a follow up on Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency efforts — has been targeting billions in health-care fraud.
But the price of work-visa fraud goes well beyond the loss of tax dollars.
The IG notes his office has already ID’d “employers and labor brokers” who “submitted fraudulent applications, exploited foreign workers through coercive wage-kickback arrangements, and undercut American workers by flooding the market with below-wage labor.”
Homeland Security reviews suggest as many as a fifth of H-1B petitions are fraudulent.
These scams may not necessarily involve stolen tax dollars, but they do fuel “violent crime,” explains D’Esposito, since the fraud is often “tied to cartels” and “transnational gangs.”
Schemes place unqualified foreigners “in medical facilities and doctors’ offices” who put “people in harm’s way.”
It’s the same story as with other government-related fraud: Loose rules and lax enforcement allow crooks and schemers to exploit well-intentioned programs.
During the Biden open-borders era, H-1B approvals — like overall illegal immigration — peaked at 442,425.
Yet, as Vance notes, these visas were meant “to ensure that if you were a brilliant technology person or a brilliant scientist or a brilliant doctor, you could come to the United States.”
Businesses — indeed, the country — need these highly skilled people to help America maintain its competitive edge in technology, commerce and other areas.
So this fraud robs the entire economy.
Of course, the H-1B program is a “patch” on an immigration system that doesn’t otherwise reward skills or address the nation’s economic needs; the left for decades has blocked all larger reforms to address that failure.
But while it exists, it needs to run right: Good on Team Trump for cracking down on yet another scam that robs the entire nation.
