Fox News H-1B Segment Sparks Debate on Indian Degrees and Visa Fraud

Fox News recently held a segment on H-1B and claimed that India gives fake degrees and that Indian H-1B applications are mostly fraudulent.

An Indian-American X user who claimed to have zero allegiance to India resisted the 'fake degree' narrative on social media and said not all Indian degrees are fake. India has highly prestigious colleges where 1 in 100 or 1000 get admission and people graduating from those colleges do not have fake degrees. The narrative started after a Fox News segment claimed that the majority of the H-1B applications from India were fraudulent. The claim was based on former US diplomat Mahvash Siddiqui's old statement. Siddiqui worked at a US consulate in India from 2005 to 2007 and her observation pertained to that period of time but Fox News made a general claim that India gives fake degrees, their H-1B applications are fraudulent. The fake degree claim was based on local police in India seizing counterfeit certificates. The claims got fanned on social media as several Conservative commentators shared the Fox News clip. Senator Eric Schmitt doubled down on the H-1B visa program and called it an international crisis. Over several X posts, the senator said the Biden administration did not check the foreign degrees of the H-1B applicants while they took American jobs. "These fakes cross borders. Unverified credentials in critical U.S. jobs create massive safety risks, to patients, our infrastructure, our national security. All while laid-off American workers train replacements. Enough. This is an international crisis, not just here but throughout the West. And India's response is to tell us to speed up the process?" Schmitt wrote.

'Top-tier Indian universities most competitive'

As the 'fake degree' narrative went viral, the Indian-American social media user who came to the US in 1991, got an H-1B, a Green Card, and then became a US citizen in 2000, said: "Not every Indian degree is fake. There are the top tier of Indian universities which are among the most competitive on earth. The admission rate is between . 01 to 1% which means 1/1000 to 1/100 who apply get in." Naming IIT, Delhi College of Engineering, IISC, Delhi University, the social media user said: "The top graduates from here then take the TOEFL and GRE and get into top graduate schools in America for masters / PhD programs and then apply for a H1 B and enter the American workforce. That was the path I and many of my friends took. You can’t buy these degrees and the kinds of high profile jobs we have if we didn’t know what we were doing it would become self evident and the market would not pay very high incomes for no work. " "The nuance I want to remind people of is this - if the Indian in question went to a top school in India and a top grad school in the US that is NOT a person that came on fraudulent credentials. You can’t buy a fake masters degree from MIT or Stanford or UT Austin for example," the user wrote.