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US diplomat Mahvash Siddiqui, an Indian American foreign service officer, has alleged that “industrialised fraud” is taking place in the H-1B visa programme and that most of the working visas issued to Indians were allegedly obtained through “fraudulent” means. Mahvash Siddiqui served at the Chennai consulate from 2005 to 2007 as consular officer.
Speaking on a podcast named ‘Parsing Immigration Policy’, Siddiqui shared her experience while she was posted in Chennai 20 years ago and claimed that 80-90% of H-1B visas issued to Indian nationals are obtained through forgery, wherein either fake degrees would be submitted or some other forged documents while some of them applying may not be highly skilled as required under the criteria to receive the H-1B visa.
A consular officer, which Siddiqui was posted as during her two years time in Chennai, is one of the world’s largest H-1B visa-processing posts where American officials adjudicate thousands of nonimmigrant visas. During the podcast, Siddiqui shared that she adjudicated about 51,000 visas in the two years span when was posted in Chennai and that most of the visas were H-1B.
During the podcast, Siddiqui called out the notion which predominantly says that the United States has a shortage of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) talent and it needs to be filled from India. She claimed that during her posting in Chennai, their team discovered the “industrialised fraud” taking place in the H-1B visa programme and raised the matter with the US Secretary of State but no action was taken due to “political pressure”.
“We quickly learnt about the fraud. We wrote a dissent cable to the Secretary of State, detailing the systematic fraud we were uncovering. But due to political pressure from the top, our adjudication was overturned,” Siddiqui said.
“As an Indian-American, I hate to say this, but fraud and bribery are normalised in India,” she said, adding she doesn’t want to generalise but it’s a systemic fraud where candidates allegedly didn’t appear for job interview themselves if the interviewer was American.
