A new lawsuit claims that Indian-origin employers in the United States used the federal H-1B visa program to exploit and cheat the Indian-origin white-collar employees who are working to win the golden prize of citizenship that is dangled by the U.S. federal government.
“Forced labor, labor trafficking, and withholding visa documents are crimes,” says the lawsuit filed by H-1B worker Amrutesh Vallabhaneni against his employer, Siri Software Solutions, and its owner, Pavan Tata. The lawsuit adds:
Nevertheless, it appears they are Defendant Siri Software Solutions, LLC’s business model … These reprehensible actions constitute forced labor and labor trafficking [via the H-1B visa program] … Plaintiff demands a jury trial to recover all damages and reasonable attorney’s fees.
For the Indian workers, “this is a Squid Game … where the ultimate goal is to stay in America,” said Jay Palmer, a consultant who helped prepare the lawsuit, told Breitbart News.
“It’s a very, very exploitative culture” because the Indian CEO’s import their home-country caste-discrimination politics to their workplaces in the United States, said Palmer, an expert on labor trafficking who has exposed many crimes and scandals.
Congress created the H-1B program in 1990, and it allowed some foreigners to climb up a legal ladder into the United States. While climbing that ladder, they can enjoy well-paid professional jobs, residency in pleasant, pollution-free towns and eventually, the golden prize of citizenship for the migrants and all their descendants. There are several ladder programs, including the L-1 and J-1 visas, which collectively keep at least 2.5 million foreign graduates in indentured service for up to 20 years.
But Congress also gave total power over each migrant to their employers. This means employers have a rational incentive to hire foreign workers who accept kickbacks, payroll deductions, and extra hours, and who will accept caste-like workplace submission and professional silence, as unwritten payments for every step on their climb to U.S. citizenship.
The Vallabhaneni Lawsuit
Indians comprise the vast majority of H-1B visa workers, largely because Indian CEOs prefer to hire people who will accept their management practices, often including acceptance of India’s caste hierarchy.
Many others are hired by India-origin hiring managers in established companies, such as Google, Meta, Tesla, Delta Airlines, Molina Healthcare, Fannie Mae, Citigroup, USAA insurance, and Intel. Many get starter jobs in Indian-run staffing companies and fight their way into brand-name Fortune 500 companies, such as FedEx.
Vallabhaneni followed a common migration path via the software subcontractors and sweatshops hidden underneath the Fortune 500 companies. This path has been followed by at least one million other Indians, even as many other smarter or better-connected migrants get hired directly at major banks, universities, and technology companies.
He first got a degree in India, and then got an F-1 student visa– and a loan — to attend a U.S. college in 2015. He quickly graduated and picked up a three-year work permit via the huge Optional Practical Training program for foreign graduates. For his next step, he agreed to work at a New Jersey company called E-Content, which was not required to pay him much of a salary. The pay and conditions of that stint are not described in the lawsuit, which says he moved to SiriSoft in 2018.
He moved to SiriSoft as it promised to push him for the next big step, a nomination into the H-1B program, which would allow him another three years of work permits. But the H-1B visa is more valuable than a work permit: It makes migrants eligible for green cards — if their employers nominate them for the prize.
SiriSoft’s owner, Pavan Tata, had gone through a similar career path from his home state of Telangana, and now holds U.S. citizenship and the legal status of “Overseas Citizen of India.”
Vallabhaneni got the H-1B promise from SiriSoft in exchange for work, and the company quickly rented him to other companies via contracts at government-set “prevailing wages.”
Of course, Vallabhaneni’s work meant that his employers did not need to hire American who would have been paid in valuable dollars and experience for the hours. Currently, U.S. companies employ roughly 1 million Indians — instead of 1 million young Americans — with work permission from various programs, including H-1B, OPT, L-1, J-1, and H4EAD. Many are brought to the United States for training, and then are sent back home to replicate the U.S. white-collar industries in India’s expanding “Global Capacity Centers.”
In his long climb, Vallabhaneni remained at the mercy of Tata, because Tata held the congressionally-granted power to cancel his H-1B visa, and send him crashing down the career ladder to India, where he could expect to earn just $10 per hour.
“SiriSoft blatantly violated the rules controlling the H-1B program, ” the lawsuit says:
First, SiriSoft required Mr. Vallabhaneni to pay all the fees associated with his H-1B visa or else lose his immigration status. This is in direct violation of law … Second, SiriSoft required Mr. Vallabhaneni to pay his own salary for a period of six months or else lose his immigration status and his pending immigrant visa. This is in direct violation of the law. … Third, SiriSoft did not pay Mr. Vallabhaneni the “prevailing wage,” which SiriSoft agreed to pay him and the law requires SiriSoft to pay, rather SiriSoft would pay Mr. Vallabhaneni 80% of whatever he earned from third party end clients—regardless of whether that matched the prevailing wage or not. Id.
Despite these blatant violations, Mr. Vallabhaneni was not free to leave SiriSoft because SiriSoft threatened to withdraw his H-1B if he did not comply with their unlawful requests. To exert further power over Mr. Vallabhaneni, SiriSoft then promised to file an immigrant [green card] visa for Mr. Vallabhaneni, which would allow him to work in the United States on an H-1B indefinitely. SiriSoft promised it would pursue an immigrant visa for him, but it repeatedly threatened to forgo the process or stop the process altogether unless Mr. Vallabhaneni accepted SiriSoft’s unlawful payment demands. Simply said, SiriSoft made clear that, if Mr. Vallabhaneni did not make these payments or accept unlawfully low pay, SiriSoft would make sure Mr. Vallabhaneni would have to leave the United States.
SiriSoft used that power to extract a huge share of Vallabhaneni’s salary, according to the lawsuit
Tata signed a letter agreement to pay AV $93,000 per year as work as a software engineer consultant for SiriSoft on March 20, 2018. Rather, SiriSoft paid AV 80% of whatever he collected from his end client, regardless of the [legally required] prevailing wage.
Breitbart News sent multiple messages about the lawsuit’s legal claims to multiple SiriSoft employees, but received no responses via email, telephone, or LinkedIn.
The Layer System
The lawsuit is silent on the consulting contracts that SirSoft assigned Vallabhaneni to work on.
That side of the H-1B business is extremely confusing because many Indian-run companies rent their workers to other Indian companies that need a bloc of workers for contracts awarded by the “end client,” most often a Fortune 500 company. That is why H-1Bs are subcontracted through multiple layers of Indian contractors before getting a badge to work in the “end client” Fortune 500 workplace.
For example, one of Sirisoft’s managers announced that he had 42 employees ready for rent to other companies. “Please send your requirements to krish@sirisoftsolutions.com or call me,” Krishna Tadakamalla wrote above the “Hot list” of 42 employees for rent. The list includes 15 workers with just one name, 2 workers with green cards, and five spouses of visa workers, and it won checkmarks from Indian recruiters who earn their incomes by assembling and trading blocs of workers for outsourcing contracts.
This so-called “layer system” allows multiple Indian CEOs to take a share of the respectable “prevailing wage” that the Fortune 500 claims to pay their H-1B subcontractors. This business model allows many managers and executives to grow rich on skimmed wages and creates a massive incentive for the CEOs to overstaff offices and to avoid productivity gains.
The layer system exists even though the 1990 H-1B law requires that each migrant worker be imported for an existing job. That requirement is routinely flouted because it was a legislative decoration intended to bypass public opposition to migration.
The law also requires that H-1B workers be paid even when they are “benched” by a manager if there is not enough contract work for all employers, or if the manager chooses to deny work to an employee. The lawsuit, however, claims a very different reality:
If AV did not earn enough during a month to cover the required prevailing wage amount—including enough to pay SiriSoft’s employer taxes—SiriSoft would require AV to pay SiriSoft the difference and then it would include AV’s payment amount in his next payroll. SiriSoft required AV to pay part of his salary or else SiriSoft would withdraw his H-1B.
The wage theft continued into 2023 and 2024, according to the lawsuit:
In 2023, Tata told AV he would need to work for two end clients at the same time. Tata told him that other consultants were doing it, and he was expected to do the same. For the next six months, AV worked more than 300 hours a month. Tata told AV if he didn’t do this his immigrant visa would not get approved. Tata agreed to pay him extra for this work, but SiriSoft never fully paid AV. Rather, they sent partial off-payroll payments through Zelle. They sent $2000 on December 1, 2022; $2,000 on February 3, 2023; and $3,000 on August 16, 2023. Each time SiriSoft deducted an additional 20% for “taxes.” But those deductions were not paid to any government; rather SiriSoft kept it.
The pressure continued into 2024 as Vallabhaneni got closer to his goal of winning the SiriSoft-sponsored, government-granted green card that would allow him to break from SiriSoft. But at every step towards his goal, the company was there with more demands, the lawsuit said:
On January 30, 2025, AV’s immigrant visa was approved. AV could not leave SiriSoft until six months after his immigrant visa was approved. SiriSoft knew this and reminded AV about it. AV needed an additional [three-year] H-1B extension in early 2025. SiriSoft again filed for an H-1B extension for AV on February 6, 2025. It was approved on June 18, 2025. But SiriSoft would not provide AV the approval notices until he paid $4,100 for his H-1B extension fees and $4,015 for his immigrant visa process … SiriSoft threatened to withdraw his H-1B unless AV agreed to write a letter to say he was paid for July of 2025. SiriSoft demanded he do so or it would not give him an “end date” for his employment. The end date is very important as it starts the 60-day grace period for AV to find a new H-1B sponsor.
The company’s extractions kept Vallabhaneni poor, despite his apparently high wages, says the lawsuit:
Despite being guaranteed a wage by the DOL, AV often barely enough money for rent and living expenses for himself and his family. Because of the broken promises and inconsistent pay, his health insurance lapsed, he missed credit card payments, and he and his wife lacked access to needed healthcare. At one point, AV suffered a serious leg injury, but he couldn’t see a doctor. He informed his HR department but Tata ignored him for months.
Vallabhaneni is now working while he waits for the eventual delivery of his prize — the green cards.
He must wait for several years because perhaps at least two million Indians have pushed themselves into line for green cards via U.S. jobs — yet Congress only awards 140,000 white-collar green cards for company employees each year. Once he gets the green card, he will be eligible for citizenship in five years.
But he will also have replaced an American who would have been hired if the H-1B program did not exist.
There are at least 1.5 million similar visa-worker migrants in jobs that would otherwise be held by young American men and women, just at the age when they should be learning a skill, moving into management, raising their own families, and recycling salaries through their local and national economy.
Instead, those young American graduates are underemployed, demoralized, and eager for advocates and politicians who champion their interests amid the accelerating exportation of their careers to India and Indians.
There is little reason to believe that SirSoft’s alleged abuse is rare. More Americans and visa workers are anonymously posting their experiences of workplace abuse online. This video, for example, shows an Indian manager berating Indian workers at a U.S. bank:
Kickbacks
The lawsuit’s claims support many critics who describe the H-1B program as cheap labor that is intended to displace well-paid Americans from jobs.
But the lawsuit also supports the view that the H-1B is a hidden, corrupt kickback program for cooperating Indian CEOs, U.S. executives, and their networks of cooperating allies.
The lawsuit shows how SiriSoft extracted much wealth from Vallabhaneni. But it has no details bout how the H-1Bs and the layer system allow executives to massively inflate their personal share of contracts and corporate revenues.
That hidden shares are buried in corporate subcontracts and operating costs, and are diverted from the investors and shareholders who do not see how the insecure, subservient, and silent visa workers must be less productive than smaller groups of better-educated, free-speaking, citizen professionals.
That kickback perspective also helps to explain why U.S. executives often hire more visa workers than the original population of American professionals. Such overstaffing and featherbedding enormously inflate the operating costs pocketed by U.S. and Indian executives instead of investors.
Many Indian visa workers tell Breitbart that Indian hiring managers fire experienced American professionals so their jobs can be sold to kickback-paying, untrained Indians. The managers demand $5,000 to $10,000 in kickbacks for each job, one Indian H-1B worker told Breitbart News. “There are very few honest Indian managers — maybe one in a million,” he said. Any honest Indian managers cannot stop the kickbacks, he said, because “you can’t survive — you will become a bottleneck in the chain. … [so senior managers] will fire you.”
In 2010, a manager at California-based Molina Healthcare Inc. testified that the Indian visa workers cost far more than the Americans they were hired to replace:
In 2006, [Amir Desai, the Indian-born chief information officer] informed MOLINA’s Upper Management, including me, that he preferred to only hire Indians from India. I watched and observed how the national origin make up of the IT Department changed from evenly mixed in 2006 to over 95 percent Indian in 2010.
DESAI would always bring in a Indian H1B contractor supplied by Cognizant before he would look for a U.S. worker. I closely followed this practice (practically an obsession with DESAI) because it actually increased MOLINA’s cost of labor and inflated the IT Department’s budget and the capital budget, both actual and projected.
I told DESAI and MOLINA’s upper management in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 that the cost of H1B contractors, at least from Cognizant [staffing contractor] was 144% higher than the present U.S. workers, including managers and benefits. The actual [budget] numbers showed that on average MOLINA paid $50 per hour to U.S. workers, salary and benefits figured in, versus the cost of labor of the H1B contractors was $72 per hour.
In 2017, the company’s board fired the CEO and the Chief Financial Officer.
In July, industry publications reported that a top Indian-born Walmart manager had accepted a massive bribe to divert a contract for 1,200 workers to an Indian-owned subcontractor. The Daily Dots Substack said the expanding bribery was hidden within many overlapping networks of cooperating Indian managers and CEOs, who comprise the layered pyramid of subcontractors under the Fortune 500 companies:
The [Walmart] setup saw executives funneling work to favored firms for personal gain, enabled by layered vendor chains: primes subcontracting to secondaries, then tertiaries, fostering opacity ripe for abuse.
As one industry analyst observed: “When you have four or five layers [of cooperating contractors] between the client and the actual worker, each taking a cut, it becomes impossible to track where influence ends and legitimate business begins.”
By and large, Palemer said, Indian executives “don’t care about our laws, because so few cases are prosecuted.”
Visas’ Impact on Professionalism and Productivity
There is growing evidence that foreign-born managers in the United States import their home-country cultures to foreign economic enclaves throughout the United States. The lawsuit shows some of the alleged pocketbook damage, but many Indians and Americans also tell Breitbart News that Congress’s visa programs allow CEOs to wreck the workplace clout of American professionals.
The gutting of the American professional class has caused huge damage because professional standards once provided a counterweight against CEO demand for short-term profits. In practice, the long-term perspective encouraged by professionalism enables innovation, computer security, accuracy in quarterly financial reports, regulatory compliance, data privacy, and much else. But the H-1B programs reward executives who discard American professionals to hire silent and compliant Indian H-1Bs.
“I was brought up that if you find a [technical problem] issue, raise it immediately,” said an American who worked at a high-tech manufacturing company. However, the rules are different in an office run by Indian managers, he said:
When you find a bug, don’t announce it [to your department colleagues]. Announce it to your [Indian] boss [because] they want to make sure it’s not their problem and not their bug. Don’t go through the normal process.
“One of the things that got me in the biggest trouble with the Indians was when I found a bug,” he said. “It was clearly our device causing the problem,” he said, adding that he described the problem via a department email instead of discreetly telling his Indian manager. The Indian manager “became unglued … screamed at me in a conference room and called me the worst engineer,” he said.
Some U.S. companies seem to have recognized the damage caused by their contractors and visa workers. In March, Citigroup announced it would sharply reduce its reliance on foreign contractors after the contractors cost the bank at least $600 million in routine operations and regulatory incompetence. The decision means Citibank will begin hiring at least 10,000 American technology professionals for jobs held by supposedly cheaper Indian workers.
Politics
Many progressives support the H-1B program because it is American support for what they see as the inspiring ambition of hard-working foreign graduates.
The Democratic Party gains from the vast inflow of H-1B workers. That inflow since 1990 has converted Virginia into a Blue State, and promises to soon move Texas into the Democratic column.
Corporate lobbyists, visa workers, Indian immigrants, and the Indian government are also trying to save the various outsourcing programs.
Many legislators are also often eager to accept the view that visa workers are valuable. “Indian nationals, who make up the largest share of H-1B recipients, are central to U.S. leadership in information technology and artificial intelligence,” said an October 30 letter from five Democratic House members to President Donald Trump. “We respectfully urge you to preserve and expand the H-1B program to strengthen America’s technological leadership, create jobs for American workers, and safeguard our national security.”
But the harms caused by the Congress’s program are increasingly being exposed by media outlets, and via many unpaid posters on social media, despite shadowbanning and suppression. For example, the influential Heritage Foundation has announced it will showcase critics of the H-1B program during a November 19 event in D.C.:
More than 30 years ago, Congress created the H-1B visa to bring a limited number of skilled, specialty workers to fill a need in the U.S. economy. The visa was specifically intended to be non-immigrant, for a period of three years maximum. Over time, like many other immigration programs, the H-1B has expanded far beyond its original conception in both numbers and what occupations it covers.
Today, American science and tech graduates can’t find jobs. Companies are laying off thousands of experienced American workers. Artificial Intelligence looms like a wrecking ball over white-collar work. All the while, employers and outsourcing “bodyshops” continue to petition for hundreds of thousands of foreign workers instead of training and hiring American workers. Join experts for a discussion of the current state of the H-1B visa and the reforms it will take to put American workers first.
Some GOP politicians are moving against the program, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, amid polls showing that the public increasingly recognizes and dislikes the visa programs.
President Donald Trump and his deputies are zig-zagging towards popular curbs on the inflow of visa workers, as they try to grow the economy by boosting productivity with technology, instead of boosting stocks with profits from imported renters, consumers, and workers from poor countries.
That shift is also part of the GOP’s electoral strategy to boost support among younger Americans: “You have the president on the H-1B visa program making it much tougher, which is going to protect mid-wage earners here in America,” Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Joe Gruters told Breitbart News in late October.
In September, for example, Trump issued a proclamation slamming the H-1B program and imposing a token $100,000 one some H-1B workers:
Another IT firm was approved for nearly 1,700 H-1B workers in FY 2025; it announced it was laying off 2,400 American workers in Oregon in July. A third company has reduced its workforce by approximately 27,000 American workers since 2022, while being approved for over 25,000 H-1B workers since FY 2022. A fourth company reportedly eliminated 1,000 jobs in February; it was approved for over 1,100 H-1B workers for FY 2025.
The program has helped foreign workers take one of every four jobs in the U.S. science, technology, and engineering sector, the proclamation says:
The number of foreign STEM workers in the United States has more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, increasing from 1.2 million to almost 2.5 million [emphasis. added], while overall STEM employment has only increased 44.5 percent during that time. Among computer and math occupations, the foreign share of the workforce grew from 17.7 percent in 2000 to 26.1 percent in 2019 [emphasis added].
The proclamation added: “The key facilitator for this influx of foreign STEM labor has been the abuse of the H-1B visa.”
