Department of Labor Inspector General Anthony D'Esposito didn't mince words. He called the H-1B visa program "not just fraud" but "a criminal enterprise that stretches far beyond the borders of America."
That's not a blogger. That's not a talk-radio host. That's the federal government's own internal watchdog, on the record.
D'Esposito launched the investigation on July 8 after a flood of whistleblower complaints. "After we heard from so many whistleblowers and we've had so many complaints, we decided that we were going to launch an investigation," he said. "The scope of the investigation is very broad."
The numbers underneath the investigation explain why. An estimated one million non-immigrant foreign workers currently hold H-1B jobs in the United States. The program imports roughly 120,000 workers annually through H-1B visas alone, with another 400,000 foreign graduates entering the workforce through Optional Practical Training permits — the OPT pipeline that lets companies skip the visa cap entirely.
H-1B holders earn 25 to 30 percent less than their American counterparts in comparable roles, according to Breitbart News. That's not a labor shortage being filled. That's a wage floor being undercut.
Meanwhile, 40 percent of new American college graduates are underemployed. Among computer science graduates — the exact field the H-1B program was supposedly designed to supplement — the combined unemployment and underemployment rate sits at 26 percent. One in four CS grads can't find appropriate work in the field they trained for, while companies import six-figure workforces from overseas at a discount.
D'Esposito acknowledged the complexity. "I don't think that the individuals in every case are the bad guys," he said. The original intent of H-1B, he noted, was narrow: "The very purpose of the H-1B visa was for American companies who had specific or unique needs." Specific. Unique. Not "cheaper" and not "more compliant."
Vice President JD Vance's Task Force to Eliminate Fraud has made the program a target, and the IG's findings hand that effort a loaded weapon. When the government's own inspector general uses the phrase "criminal enterprise" to describe a program that corporate America has treated as a divine right, the reform argument stops being ideological and becomes prosecutorial.
The tech lobby will frame this as anti-innovation. They always do. It's a strange argument to make about a program where the government's own watchdog found systemic criminality, where visa holders get paid a quarter less than Americans, and where one in four domestic CS graduates can't find work in their own field. Innovation apparently requires a permanent underclass of underpaid foreign workers and a permanent surplus of unemployed American ones.
The H-1B program was built for companies with genuine, specialized needs they couldn't fill domestically. What it became was a bulk-discount labor pipeline that suppresses wages, displaces graduates, and — according to the man whose job is to audit it — operates as a criminal enterprise.