Kayleigh McEnany just put a number on the foreign scam that cost Americans their jobs — and it's bigger than anyone admitted.
A police raid in India seized 100,000 fake degrees, and investigators say the buyers came straight to America.
When Congress asked how many made it through America's foreign worker visa program, the agency running it gave an answer that should end careers.
How the H-1B Visa Program Replaced American Workers With Cheap Foreign Labor
The H-1B program was sold to Congress as a narrow pipeline for genuinely rare skills that no American worker could fill.
What it became was a visa factory that lets corporations swap out American engineers, nurses, and tech workers for cheaper foreign labor.
Companies sponsoring H-1B workers are only required to pay the "prevailing wage" — a legal minimum so low that corporations use it as a ceiling, which is why the vast majority of H-1B hires during the Biden years landed at junior or entry-level pay grades.
An American worker with a real degree and ten years of experience gets shown the door, and the company brings in someone younger, cheaper, and — as it turns out — sometimes credentialed with a piece of paper that cost $1,400 from a factory in India.
The Center for Immigration Studies filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking USCIS one question: how many H-1B visa holders got their credentials from Manav Bharti University — the Indian institution that sold 36,025 fake degrees while awarding just 5,455 real ones?
USCIS answered: it doesn't track that data.
Not "we investigated and found no problem." Not "we have a system that flags these applicants." Just — we don't know.
Nearly 7 million visas processed since 2015. Seventy percent going to Indian nationals. Not a single database capable of cross-referencing credentials against known fraud operations.
Kayleigh McEnany posted the breakdown, citing former U.S. consular officer Mahvash Siddiqui's allegation that 80 to 90 percent of H-1B applications from the Chennai consulate region involved fraudulent documentation or unqualified applicants.
Chennai processed 220,000 H-1B visas and 140,000 dependent visas in 2024 alone.
https://twitter.com/kayleighmcenany/status/2063312981090328755
Inside the India Fake Degree Factory That Fed the H-1B Pipeline
Kerala Police dismantled the operation in late 2025 — 11 arrests, 100,000 fake certificates seized, a network spanning at least 28 universities.
The forged documents covered medicine, nursing, and engineering — precisely the credentials that qualify someone for the most competitive H-1B categories.
The price of a fake degree: $1,400.
The reward: a six-figure salary, a path toward permanent residency, and a job taken from an American worker who earned their degree honestly.
Trump Launches H-1B Fraud Crackdown After Biden Left the Door Wide Open
Biden presided over a program so abused by outsourcing companies that what was sold to Congress as a pipeline for the best and brightest became a mechanism for replacing American workers with foreign labor dressed up in visa paperwork.
Trump moved.
In September 2025, Trump signed a proclamation slapping a $100,000 filing fee on every new H-1B petition.
The Department of Labor opened 175 fraud investigations and found over $15 million in back wages that employers owed workers and never paid. USCIS stood up Operation Twin Shield — by the agency's own description, the largest fraud investigation in its history.
H-1B registrations dropped 25 percent year over year for fiscal 2026. Multiple registrations per applicant — a known fraud signal — fell to an average of 1.01 per person, down sharply from prior years.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton didn't wait for Washington. He issued demands to nearly 30 North Texas businesses suspected of running ghost office schemes — fake company locations used to fraudulently sponsor H-1B workers.
What Democrats Cannot Answer
The fraud is not a bug in the system — it's what happens when a program gets deliberately left unmonitored for 17 years.
USCIS ran one compliance audit in 2008, found 13 percent of approved H-1B visas were fraudulent, and apparently decided that wasn't worth a follow-up.
Outsourcing companies gamed the lottery by flooding it with duplicate registrations until Trump shut it down. Visa consultancies in India built entire businesses around forging employment letters, transcripts, and degrees — and American consulates were processing 220,000 of these applications a year without the staffing to review them seriously.
Siddiqui described a fraud ecosystem so normalized it operated in plain sight. Applicants sent stand-ins to interviews when they knew the reviewing officer was American.
Indian managers allegedly steered H-1B job offers to fellow nationals in exchange for payment. The credential on the application was often the last thing anyone bothered to verify.
Democrats called H-1B reform anti-immigrant. They protected a system that was stealing jobs from American workers — and now McEnany is holding up the receipt.
Trump fixed the lottery. Trump imposed the fee. Trump launched the investigations.
The only question left is whether anyone will finally build the database that shows exactly how many fake degrees are already inside American hospitals, tech firms, and engineering departments — because right now, nobody knows.
Sources:
- Center for Immigration Studies, "What H-1B Fraud?" CIS.org, February 13, 2025.
- Fox News, "Trump Admin Reveals Over 100 Investigations into H-1B Abuses," FoxNews.com, November 7, 2025.
- USCIS, "DHS Strengthens Integrity in Nation's Immigration System," USCIS.gov, November 13, 2025.
- Center for Immigration Studies / Mahvash Siddiqui, "Industrialized Fraud: H-1B Visa Program," CIS Podcast, 2025.
- The Register, "Uncle Sam Claims H-1B Fraud Crackdown Is Working as Registrations Drop 25%," TheRegister.com, May 15, 2025.