‘Desi consultancies’ connect Indian tech workers to American employers through a maze of recruiters, subcontractors, universities, and corporate clients.
For decades, the H-1B visa program has been the centerpiece of America’s high-skilled immigration system. To its defenders, it is a vital pipeline that brings talented workers from around the world to power the United States’ economy. But to its critics, it is a system rife with abuse—one that can undermine American workers while also trapping foreign workers in exploitative arrangements.
A new book, Wild Wild East: Exiled Americans, Enslaved Indians and the Systemic Abuse of the H-1B Visa Programme, takes readers inside one especially shadowy corner of this world: the universe of so-called “desi consultancies”. These companies—also known as H-1B “body shops”— connect Indian tech workers to American employers through a maze of recruiters, subcontractors, universities, and corporate clients.
The book’s author, Tanul Thakur, discussed his disturbing account of Indian H-1B seekers, displaced American tech workers, and the firms that profit from a deeply broken system on a recent episode of Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast coproduced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Thakur is an award-winning journalist and film critic. In 2015, he won the National Film Award for Best Film Critic—the youngest critic ever to receive the honour.
What are Desi Consultancies?
“Desi consultancies often lie to tech workers in India that they have a job in the US,” Thakur explained, recounting his own firsthand experience with one such firm when he was looking for a job after finishing college in the US. “It is only when the workers arrive in the US that they find out they have been lied to—and were essentially trafficked from India to the US.”
Thakur described the world of desi consultancies as “really dark.” Such firms engage in “rampant wage theft and psychological devastation at a level that still makes me shudder,” he said. “Pay is often delayed. There are deportation threats and legal intimidation. Given that you are so beholden to your visa sponsor or employer…you often do not protest these working conditions. You start to live a double life. At the job, you have lied and said that you have seven years of experience. Then you come back home and have to talk to someone on Skype or Webex to get your job done.”
Thakur said the exploitation perpetrated by these firms is an open secret, but that US authorities have not sufficiently cracked down on them. “Corporate America benefits, and it wields a disproportionate amount of clout in keeping the H-1B program the way it is,” he explained. “This is closely followed by the laxity of the Department of Labor in detecting and penalising the bad apples. Even when firms are debarred from the H-1B program, which is rare, they often open companies under a false name and continue the same process.”
