How Indians Turned a Kentucky University Into a Foreign Worker Trafficking Ring
Americans feel like they’re living under a government run by an elite class that behaves more like royalty than public servants. It isn’t one president, one party, or one administration. It’s the permanent US government that consists of elected and unelected insiders… all the bureaucrats, consultants, lobbyists, and corporate middlemen who are perched high above everyone else while regular Americans are treated like peasants expected to stay quiet and keep the machine running. And when that elite class builds a system with loopholes big enough to swallow us whole, it’s no wonder foreigners slither over and start pillaging.
The H1-B scam is a perfect example of that screwed-up system.
Sure, you can get angry at the foreigners who waltz through the open door, but the real blame sits with the people who built the door in the first place. They decorated it, propped it open, and then ignored it when everyone flooded in. That’s exactly what you’re looking at in this latest situation at Kentucky University of the Cumberlands and a crafty Indian businessman, Anil Palla, who figured out how to turn a rural American university into a Day-1 CPT pipeline… or, to put it simpler, a backdoor into the H1-B system that our own government has been too corrupt or too comfortable to fix.
This leaked video from University of Cumberlands exposes how a Indian Businessman Anil Palla has taken control of a rural Kentucky based university, and turned it into foreign workers trafficking ring issuing unethical Day1 CPT work permit as backdoor to the H1B visa.
Day-1 CPT allows foreign students to begin working for U.S. employers from the first day of enrollment. At @CumberlandU, students are only required to visit campus once per semester. students enroll primarily to obtain work authorization that lets them hold full-time jobs.
We’re being hollowed out by people who know exactly how weak and exploitable our system has become. And it’s been this way for years. The political class makes money, the middlemen get rich, foreign workers get the green light, and Americans get squeezed out of their own job market while being told it’s “good for the economy.”
If you want to understand how deep this scam really goes, just look at the numbers coming out of Kentucky. While the rest of America saw Indian student enrollment drop off a cliff, Kentucky magically became the hottest destination in the country. There was a 70 percent spike in one state, driven almost entirely by two private universities nobody had ever heard of until this entire mess exploded.
Hyderabad At a time when the American Universities have seen a sharp fall in the enrollment by Indian students, the state of Kentucky has seen a 70 per cent hike in the enrollment. As per The Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVIS) 2018 report of US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) two universities in Kentucky accord for the thousands of Indians students. Interestingly a majority of the growth has come from just two private universities: University of the Campbellsville and University of Cumberlands — together they account for 84 per cent of all international master’s students in Kentucky during 2017-18.
Another interesting trend observed is that in Kentucky the number of master’s degree students more than doubled in the same period. The report has revealed is that despite the galloping growth in Indian student population in the state, students seeking bachelor’s degrees has declined by 8.8 per cent and percentage of those enrolling for Master has shot up by a whopping 200. 4 per per cent.
The number of students pursuing PhD has also a jump by 13.4 per cent. These varsities alongside offering full-time, on-campus undergraduate, and graduate degrees, also offer master’s programs with mostly online curricula targeting working professionals. For such students, many of those who don’t even live in Kentucky, take online courses and visit the school only one weekend per semester. Kiran, (name changed on request) a former student of the university and currently working with the Tech firm in Maryland on H1B visa said, “Since most students come with the mindset that they are spending lakhs on fee or have to repay the loan they took to fund their tution fee and stay here, they decide to enroll in a second Msaters degree while awaiting HIB visa processing. Indian students find such courses attractive since attendance is not mandatory,” he said.
This was how 600 students of which 568 were Telugus, fell in the trap of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which had set up the University of Franmington, only to trap such immigrants who have been “illegally overstaying” in the US. On January 30, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested eight students-turned recruiters from the fake varsity and detained another 130. The program setup, however, worries many like Krishan, who landed in the US in 2006 as a student and then transitioned to H1B on graduation. “Throughout my 13 years of stay in this country, I have come across many students that take false steps and jeopardize there legal stay in US. Today its Farmnington University, tomorrow it will be another. The fate of such students who are not following the regulations will not be any different,” he said.
And speaking of the students, a former one came forward and confirmed what everyone suspected: the university wasn’t just looking the other way, it was the engine powering the entire scam. Wait until you hear what he saw inside those online classes…
NEW: a former student at the University of the Cumberlands sheds light on their complicity in the Indian visa scam.
The student signed up for online classes and noticed that every other person in his classes was Indian, a sharp difference from the other colleges and study programs he was in. He did some research and discovered that the University of the Cumberlands offered work-while-you-study programs as a form of practical training.
The Indian students in this individual’s online classes were not real students. They were enrolled solely so they could retain their visas while working jobs. They likely plagiarized all of their college coursework using essay mills or AI, too.
The student believes that DHS and USCIS knew of these phony Indian students but did nothing. We demand action. No more Indian scammers in our workplaces or universities.
And here’s another student story about this H-1B pipeline school, the kind of case that shows exactly how these programs pull big numbers in.
By day, Swamy works full-time as a software developer in New York City. Late at night and over the weekends he’s a full-time university student, taking courses online. The main reason he does both is, as he puts it, “so that I can keep working in the US.”
For the past two and half years, Swamy has been pursuing graduate degrees at the University of the Cumberlands, a private Baptist university in rural Kentucky. Quartz has decided to withhold Swamy’s last name. He has already completed the credit requirements for a master’s degree in information systems security, and is now working toward a PhD. During his time in the US, he has gotten three master’s degrees in information technology from three universities.
Swamy came to the US from India in 2010 to pursue a master’s degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Upon completion of that program, he spent 18 months looking for a full-time job. By the time he found one, he had lost his authorization to work in the US. Getting a new work visa was difficult.
“I have to be in college to take the job,” he said.Swamy is not alone. The rural Kentucky college that he’s enrolled in has seen a large influx of students from abroad, even as international enrollments at US universities overall have fallen. It’s no accident. Cumberlands and other universities have created programs that appeal to students like Swamy who are trying to stay working in the US through all legal means. The schools are benefitting from the US immigration system’s quirks, boosting enrollment by attracting people more interested in working in the US than receiving the education programs like these provide.
“People who’ve got themselves into the same situation are sharing it in online websites, Facebook groups,” said Swamy, as he described how he came to know of the program at Cumberlands. A curated list of such qualifying programs appeared in 2015 on a forum that connects foreign tech workers to potential employers.Nationwide, fewer international students came to the US last year. Thirty-two US states experienced a drop in international student population from March 2017 to March 2018. The other 18 states and Washington DC saw an increase. But Kentucky was an outlier. The international student population in Kentucky grew by more than 70%, or more than 6,200 students.
The dramatic change in Kentucky is partially because the state is not traditionally a popular destination for international students. The total number of international students in Kentucky (15,240 by March 2018) is small compared to those in New York (138,750 by March 2018), the state with the largest international student population.
All of this corruption and nonsense is why Trump’s base is so adamant about dismantling the H1-B system entirely. Every time you peel back another layer, you find more corruption, more loopholes, and more elites profiting off the decline of the people they’re supposed to represent.
The Heritage Foundation is weighing in on the H1-B debate, calling for Congress and the administration to drastically reform certain U.S. visa policies, the Daily Caller first learned.
The debate over H1-B visas began after President Donald Trump appeared with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham in November and was pressed on the policy proposal. Trump argued America needs to import more people because current citizens are not skilled or talented enough to do certain jobs.
Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow for the Border and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation, wrote a report on the policy, calling on Congress to eliminate the exemptions for research and nonprofits, replace the H-1B lottery with a wage-based ranking system and expressly state that H-4 visa holders are not authorized to work.
“Rather than this regulatory back and forth swing between administrations, it’s past time for Congress to end not only the numerous types of H-1B abuses, but also the administrative state creations that developed the student-to-H-1B-green-card pipeline that adversely affects American students and employees,” Hankinson writes in the report.
The Heritage Foundation also makes recommendations for how the Trump administration should change the H1-B policy. The report suggests that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) should “limit the number of H1-B applicants each company can petition for annually” while also permanently barring “any company, individual or entity from petitioning or participating in the H1-B process if it knowingly violates immigration law.”
Sure, Trump has come a long way on this issue since 2016, but the base’s frustration is real. They’re seeing how deep the rot goes, and they’re not wrong. Every day exposes another cavernous hole carved out for someone else to benefit while Americans get screwed over, again and again.
But it’s not just President Trump who needs a full recalibration. Five years ago, we covered how Republicans, including the supposedly “based” Mike Lee, sold out American workers with a shady green-card giveaway that nobody asked for and nobody benefited from except the usual insiders.
Dick Durbin and Mike Lee teamed up to push a plan that basically said, “Let’s help foreign workers stuck in the green-card line get to the front faster.”
They wanted to let foreign workers already in America skip ahead. They wanted to save thousands of green cards for people waiting overseas. Every year, they’d set aside 4,600 green cards specifically for foreign workers who aren’t even in the US yet. They called it “stopping abuse,” but it still protected the visa pipelines. They added a tiny rule saying companies can’t hire more H-1B visa workers if half their staff is already on visas. Sounds tough, right? Pff. The truth is barely anyone fits that description. So that was a cute little cosmetic rule so the bill looked like it was helping Americans (it didn’t). It was actually about keeping the foreign worker pipeline flowing:
More benefits for foreign workers.
More green cards handed out.
More fast-tracking.
And more pressure on the American worker who’s already competing in a rigged system.
It wasn’t framed that way, of course. It never is.
Just when you think that the Senate Republicans have nothing more to give in terms of betraying the President and the America First platform he ran on, they manage to exceed expectations yet again.
The latest iteration of betrayal comes in the form of a green card giveaway promoted by Republican Utah Senator Mike Lee and Democrat Illinois Senator Dick Durbin.
[…]
This green card handout is a huge boon to IT companies dependent on cheap labor from India and China, and terrible for American holders of STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) degrees who already face tough job prospects in a corona-depressed economy.
Revolver Exclusive: A Congressional source described the legislation to Revolver.news as a “slap in the face” to the Trump Agenda. The legislation does not include ANY of President Trump’s requested reforms, either to the asylum system or to the H1-B visa system which is used by IT employers to undercut American STEM graduates.
The components of the Lee-Durbin green card giveaway are as follows:
1. Immigrant workers and their immediate family members would be eligible for “early filing” for their green cards. Immigrant workers would be able to switch jobs and travel without losing their immigration status. The amendment includes a critical protection from Durbin’s RELIEF Act, which would protect the children of immigrant workers from “aging out” of green-card eligibility so they will not face deportation while they are waiting for a green card.
2. The amendment would reserve 4,600 green cards on an annual basis for immigrant workers who are stuck in the backlog overseas and not eligible for early filing.
To add insult to injury, the amendment includes a largely fake and symbolic bread crumb substitute for genuine H-1B reform.Finally, the amendment would address abuse of H-1B temporary work visas by prohibiting a company from hiring additional H-1B workers if the company’s workforce is more than 50 employees and more than 50 percent temporary workers.
A congressional source intimately familiar with deliberations on the matter has told Revolver.news that Durbin has appeased even the immigration “hawks” in the Senate, and that the green card giveaway legislation is moving along swimmingly in the Republican-controlled senate.One White House source and one former White House official familiar with internal deliberations offer additional perspective on the White House’s relation to this legislation.
Apparently, some in the White House welcome the green card giveaway as part of an electoral strategy to woo the IT sector, and Indian voters in North Carolina.
Granted, that fiasco didn’t pass, but that’s because we and other outlets sounded the alarm bells. What did pass was this:
Their broader bill Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act — meant to eliminate per-country caps on employment-based green cards — did pass both the House and the Senate in December 2020.
But this was a slap in the face to Americans as well, because it eliminated per-country caps and didn’t actually “fix” anything. It just gave countries like India, which already dominates the visa pipeline, even more access to green cards. Instead of reducing foreign competition, it turbocharged it. Thanks, guys…
You can look at Kentucky’s Day-1 CPT loophole or this elder-fraud case out of Florida; it doesn’t matter much, it’s the same story on repeat. Foreign nationals mastering a corrupt system. Elites protecting the system. Americans are taking the hit. And politicians talking a big game about “fairness” while quietly pushing bills that hand out more benefits to foreign workers and corporate donors.
They’re not fighting for the American worker. They’re tag-teaming with the people who benefit from these pipelines that are drowning hardworking Americans in confusion, paperwork, and bureaucratic traps, then pretending it’s all normal and “part and parcel.”