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Employers who reach past American applicants to fill jobs with foreign visa holders have become the central preoccupation of the federal office that polices workplace bias. Harmeet Dhillon, who holds the post of civil rights chief at Justice, says complaints of exactly that kind now dominate her division's docket.

"We have absolutely ramped this up big time, and it's our main focus," Dhillon said during a September 2 appearance with streamer Sara Gonzales. "Almost all of our new cases involving labor discrimination actually involve discrimination against Americans," she said.

Three agencies are moving in concert. "We're working together with EEOC and the Department of Labor to put a stop to this discrimination and make sure there's a level playing field for the American worker," she said.

Groups representing American professionals greeted the news warmly. "To the fullest extent of the law, she's doing a great deal," said Kevin Lynn, whose organization U.S. Tech Workers lobbies on their behalf. He sees pressure arriving from two directions.

Progress is being made, and it's being made on two fronts. The electorate is becoming energized on this [visa worker] issue … [so] it's a losing electoral issue for any candidate in this one, especially Republicans … [and] it is pressuring the administration to make it a priority.

Nothing in federal law forces a company to canvass the domestic labor pool before hiring abroad, Dhillon acknowledged. She builds her case on different grounds.

It doesn't require that you prove that an American is not available. However, our overarching federal civil rights laws make nationality discrimination a violation of federal employment law. Now, before this administration, the DOJ, and Department of Labor, and EEOC didn't really consider anti-American discrimination to be national origin discrimination. But of course, American is a national origin. Whether you're a naturalized citizen or you're born here, that's a nationality. And if we're being undercut by cheaper foreign labor systematically, that's an employment discrimination matter.

Breitbart News, which broke her comments, has followed the money moving through these programs for years. A February verdictconvicted an Indian manager who had sold a position at Optum, a UnitedHealth Group subsidiary, to a fellow migrant.

Over at the Labor Department, Inspector General Anthony D'Esposito has fired off dozens of subpoenas in his own inquiry into H-1B and PERM filings.

"This is not just fraud: This is a criminal enterprise that stretches far beyond the borders of America," D'Esposito explained to Breitbart News in his Washington office in July. He promised that the completed file will identify who sits behind the trade:

"Without revealing too much of an investigation, I think that when complete, one of the things that will probably make the American people most angry … and will probably lead to the biggest change from lawmakers — they will probably bring oversight to this — [is] the fact that many of the individuals that you're talking about that are selling these jobs, getting kickbacks. We will clearly outline and define their relationships with — whether it's gangs [or] whether it is transnational criminal organizations."

Pay sits at the center of her complaint, and she says business interests on both sides of the aisle share in the savings:

"I want to be very clear here. The dirty secret here is that employers who are conservative, employers who are liberal, they're all benefiting from paying a lower wage to foreigners, and they're trying to protect their bottom line.

But it's the job of our lawmakers in Congress to make sure that the American worker is protected; we have those laws on the books. It's not just a violation of federal law, but it's also a violation of almost every state law to discriminate on the basis of national origin."

Her quarter century in Silicon Valley informs what came next, a tour of the layers separating Fortune 500 clients from the technologists themselves:

"I worked in Silicon Valley before I came to this job for 25 years, and here are the economics of it. There are often three or four so-called body shops [for each Fortune 500 company] … I used to call them software pimps when I was there … That body shop may need to fill a job [but] they can't find those people because each of them can sponsor so many at a time, and so [the body shops] trade these human beings like currency.

If the [visa worker] software guy … is getting paid $70 an hour, $60 an hour … [then] each of the two or three intermediary body shops is taking $10 on top of that. So the [Fortune 500] company is actually paying a pretty robust wage, but they're paying it to a body shop, and then there are three middlemen in between taking a cut, and the last middleman may not be paying that guy. And guess what? He he can't do anything about it because if he loses his H-1B position, then he gets deported, and so he will shut up and and and not complain.

So it is a form of human trafficking, and Congress could stop this and probably should reform this system, which is rife with abuse the way it is currently being practiced."

Pressure applied to corporate boards by public pension funds compounds the damage, she said:

"There are also kickbacks and those types of schemes, and there are also — prior to this administration, probably still persisting in California and places like that — preferences for women-owned or minority-owned firms that are doing contracting, and that's thanks to these wrong-headed pressure tactics on Fortune 500 companies by big pension funds like Calpers and others."

Anyone hoping for defendants by name will have to wait. "I can't say which companies because we're in conciliation with some of them, but Fortune 20 companies are doing this, and we're going to put a stop to it," Dhillon said, adding that "we're really cracking down on it."

The totals Breitbart cites run past 1.5 million visa workers occupying positions open to Americans, of which H-1B supplies a minimum of 730,000 along with 150,000 spouses. Washington keeps no live tally. USCIS last measured the authorized to work population as of September 2019 and arrived at roughly 583,000.

Tighter enforcement inside a rotten framework will not fix any of this. Lawmakers need to shrink employment visa admissions to a rare exception, returning first claim on American jobs to citizens and lawful permanent residents, and they need to scrap the preference schemes that rank contractors and job seekers by ancestry and sex ahead of merit. No state that sorts its own people into racial ledgers can offer any of them an honest guarantee of equal treatment, and tearing down that machinery is what the even handed enforcement Dhillon describes actually requires.

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