Feds Arrest California Group for Aiding Chinese Exam and Visa Cheats

Federal investigators arrested five people for helping Chinese nationals cheat their way into U.S. universities — and then perhaps into U.S. jobs and research laboratories.

“The indictment charges the defendants with conspiring to use false passports, using false passports, and aggravated identity theft as part of the scheme to impersonate Chinese nationals who were required to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) to obtain a student visa,” said the official announcement.

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The alleged ringleader, “[Liu] Cai paid for and registered 14 Chinese nationals for TOEFL exams over a one-year period in 2015 and 2016. Following the tests, Cai allegedly paid three co-defendants approximately $400 per test from his PayPal and Venmo accounts,” the report said.

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The sweep comes as White House officials face intense lobbying by business and university groups who want more foreign students to be pumped into U.S. universities, workplaces, and research centers.

The students are delivered via visa-worker programs, including the Optional Practical Training and the Curricular Practical Training programs which allow roughly 400,000 foreign students and graduates to hold jobs in a wide variety of sectors. Many of those graduates subsequently get H-1B work-permits, which put them on track to eventually get green cards.

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The job theft is accelerated by widespread cheating among foreign workers, who fabricate resumes, lie about their expertise, and even fraudulently claim expertise in lip-synched video interviews, say U.S professionals who have been pushed out of jobs by cheap visa-workers.

Some of the foreign workers secretly pay wages to their U.S.-based employers because their main goal is to win employer-sponsored green cards, according to indictments.

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For example, the green cards allow foreigners to leave their poor, crime-plagued, caste-ridden home countries and to bring their families, parents — and all of their descendants — into the wealthy, low crime, high-trust, socially open American society, just for the price of working a low-wage white-collar job for ten years.

The incentive for Chinese and Indians to cheat will be expanded by pending legislation, titled H.R.1044 and S.386.

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{snip} The promise of “shorter wait times for [green cards] might actually incentivize greater numbers of nationals from India, China, and the Philippines to seek employment-based [green card] status,” a CRS report warned legislators. “If that were to occur, the reduction in the number of [workers in jobs with approved green card] petitions pending might be short-lived,” said the December 2018 report.

The outsourcing legislation is being pushed by Colorado GOP Rep. Ken Buck in the House and by several GOP Senators, including Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), Sen. Jim Moran (R-KS), Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO), Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND).

The alleged cheating by foreign workers has also prompted multiple lawsuits by sidelined Americans.

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