The FBI probe and arrest follow promises by President Donald Trump’s deputies to supercharge investigations into white-collar migration crime. The Department of Justice (DoJ) reported:
Two Texas residents, Abdul Hadi Murshid, 39, and Muhammad Salman Nasir, 35, both originally from Pakistan, a law firm, and a business entity were charged by indictment with conspiracy to defraud the United States, visa fraud, money laundering conspiracy, and Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO) conspiracy, announced Acting United States Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Chad E. Meacham. Murshid and Nasir were also charged with unlawfully obtaining and attempting to obtain United States citizenship.
The defendants face up to twenty years in jail.
The federal government authorizes a fluctuating population of approximately 1.5 million migrants to work in white-collar jobs across the United States. The workers arrive through various white-collar visa schemes, including the H-1B work visa and the EB program for green card applicants.
These schemes provide several incentives and opportunities for corruption and fraud in the legal migration system. Despite the tremendous damage to Americans’ white-collar professionals, per-capita productivity, and national creativity, the government has done nothing to discover or minimize the fraud over the last decades.
The programs also limit the capacity of American experts to enforce legal, technical, and professional standards, despite the federal government’s contention that Americans benefit from the standards, regulations, and laws established by it.
The FBI has the opportunity to identify and sanction the two lawyers’ previous clients. They can also put pressure on those consumers to disclose proof of further deception by other migrants.
The DOJ reported:
The indictment alleges that the defendants exploited the EB-2, EB-3, and H-1B visa programs. Specifically, the defendants caused classified advertisements to be placed in a daily periodical for non-existent jobs. These advertisements were placed in order to satisfy a Department of Labor (“DOL”) requirement to offer the position to United States citizens before hiring foreign nationals. Once they received the fraudulently obtained certification for from the Department of Labor, the defendants filed a petition to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”) to obtain an immigrant visa for the visa seekers.
At the time the petitions were submitted, the defendants also submitted an application for legal permanent residence so that the visa seekers could also obtain a green card. According to the indictment, to make the non-existent jobs look legitimate, the defendants received payment from visa seekers, then returned a portion of the money back to the visa seekers as purported payroll.
The H-1B program is designed for white-collar workers looking to obtain green cards. The EB-2 and EB-3 programs enable businesses to offer foreign workers the lucrative prize of green cards and citizenship.
Trump’s deputies have promised to crack down on airport-migrant fraud while working to deport border migrants.
“We have added the following priority areas for tips: procurement and federal program fraud; trade, tariff, and customs fraud; violations of federal immigration law,” said a department official, Matthew Galeotti, chief of the department’s Criminal Division.
Andrea Lucas, the new head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), has also pledged an increased focus on visa fraud. “If you are part of the pipeline contributing to our immigration crisis or abusing our legal immigration system via illegal preferences against American workers, you must stop,” she informed us.
“We hope that what they do to enforce laws has teeth and leads to change,” said Dan Kotchen, at Kotchen & Low LLP, who has filed discrimination cases against major Indian-run staffing companies. He is also filing visa fraud cases via the False Claims Act, despite passivity from the federal government.
