Cognizant is one of the biggest names in IT outsourcing, headquartered in New Jersey but founded in Chennai, India, and for two decades it ran a practice that a federal jury and subsequent findings say amounted to systematic discrimination: submitting H-1B visa applications for jobs that didn't actually exist, then using the visa pipeline to build and maintain a workforce skewed heavily toward a single national origin.
The numbers here aren't vague allegations — they're termination statistics broken down by ethnicity. Non-Indian and South Asian workers were found to be 8.4 times more likely to be terminated "from the bench" — meaning while sitting unassigned between projects, a standard industry practice — than workers who fit the preferred profile. The termination rates tell the story on their own: South Asian employees were terminated at a rate of just 1%, while Black employees were terminated at 27%, Hispanic employees at 20%, and white employees at 9%. Those aren't the kind of numbers that happen by accident or by pure merit-based project staffing.
Dr. Jean-Claude Franchitti, a French citizen with a Ph.D. in computer science, was fired in 2016 after reporting he had been asked to sign hundreds of fraudulent letters regarding H-1B visa applications.
That detail matters because it's not a disgruntled competitor or a political pressure group making the claim — it's an employee with the technical credentials to know exactly what he was being asked to certify, blowing the whistle from inside the company and getting fired for it. Fraudulent letters, filed over a 20-year period, for a visa program that exists on paper specifically to bring in workers of "distinguished merit and ability" for jobs where no qualified American can be found.
That's the actual mechanism worth understanding here, separate from any single company's guilt or innocence: H-1B was sold to Congress and the public as a narrow tool for genuine skills scarcity. What the Cognizant case lays out in granular, jury-tested detail is a business model built around treating the visa program as a staffing pipeline — file for positions, keep a captive workforce that can't easily leave without jeopardizing its legal status, and stack a bench that's disproportionately easy to retain and disproportionately hard for anyone outside the preferred pipeline to break into. Cognizant, for its part, says it "provide[s] equal employment opportunities" and denies the discrimination allegations, but the termination-rate disparities and the whistleblower account are hard to explain away as coincidence.
This is also where the "we just can't find qualified American workers" defense of H-1B falls apart under its own weight. If the actual selection criterion inside a major sponsor's staffing pipeline is national origin rather than merit — if American workers of every other background are getting cut from the bench at rates four to twenty-seven times higher than the preferred group — then the program isn't functioning as a scarcity-driven merit filter. It's functioning as a low-cost, high-control labor pipeline that happens to have "specialty occupation" stamped on the paperwork.
Cases like this are exactly why H-1B skepticism isn't xenophobia dressed up in policy language — it's a straightforward response to a documented pattern of the program being used exactly the way its critics have warned about for years: not to import scarce genius, but to build a workforce that's cheaper to retain and harder to leave, at the direct expense of the American workers competing for the same roles.
Read the original reporting at TheBlaze.