A report by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) last year described a scheme involving 13 related companies working together to exploit the lottery system
Kandi Srinivasa Reddy, a candidate who ran in the 2023 Telangana assembly elections from Adilabad on a Congress ticket, is embroiled in allegations of manipulating the US H-1B visa lottery system. Reddy has vehemently denied these accusations, which claim his staffing company clients received an unfair advantage in the lottery. A Bloomberg investigative report suggests that Reddy used multiple company names to submit numerous applications for the same individuals, thereby increasing their chances of being selected.
Reddy contends that filing multiple entries is legal and questions why he is being singled out when numerous companies employ similar strategies. He noted that his firms secured 302 visas out of 425,000 in the past five years.
As an NRI, Reddy founded Cloud Big Data Technologies LLC in 2013. According to Bloomberg, Reddy’s firm and other entities under his control submitted over 3,000 entries, securing a substantial number of H-1B visas since 2020. The H-1B visa lottery, a key element of US foreign worker employment policy, aims to allocate a limited number of visas to skilled workers. In 2023, 446,000 applicants vied for just 85,000 available H-1B visas.
Bloomberg’s report highlights how staffing and outsourcing companies, including those managed by Reddy, exploit the lottery system, disadvantaging other US businesses and talented immigrants. It claims Reddy’s companies, such as Machine Learning Technologies LLC, submitted duplicate applications under different names with overlapping addresses.
The report also reveals that H-1B workers were rented out to major corporations like Meta Platforms Inc. and HSBC Holdings Plc., with Reddy’s firms collecting 20% to 30% of the workers’ pay, potentially earning up to $15,000 or more annually per worker
A report by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) last year described a scheme involving 13 related companies working together to exploit the lottery system. While the report did not name these companies, Bloomberg claims to have matched the details to Reddy’s operations through visa data. Neither USCIS nor Reddy’s representatives confirmed or denied the connections.
The report quoted Lucas Garritson, a Texas lawyer representing Reddy, who stated that several of the companies’ visas had been challenged by USCIS for lottery system abuse. However, he argued that the agency had not followed proper procedures for prohibiting such activities and lacked proof that Reddy’s companies violated any rules.
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