L Visa: A Prime Example of How Government 'Oversight' Has Failed

The L visa may be the worst visa you’ve never heard of, depending on how deep you dive into temporary nonimmigrant visa categories. According to the statute, the L visa was created only for the intracompany transfer of executive management for companies or those with “specialized knowledge.” Essentially, that means multinational corporations with an office in the United States can move management-level personnel from abroad into their U.S. site. 

However, a recent Bloomberg story details a lawsuit alleging tech bodyshop company Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) was improperly classifying front-line employees as managers to acquire numerically uncapped L visas and avoid the H-1B numerical cap. Pull the curtain further back to see how the government has known for years that the L visa is vulnerable to fraud. The government “oversight” process has been on autopilot for years, documenting fraud vulnerabilities and promptly following up and through on nothing. 

First, what is the L visa? If you’re anything like me, then you think it seems like a very odd employment category that seemingly serves a niche, unnecessary purpose. The argument for the visa is that the most sensitive knowledge regarding a business is the internal policies, practices, history, and strategies. You can hire and train employees for many positions, but top leadership positions are difficult to fill externally. The L visa allowed companies to easily shift executive leadership positions to the United States. Executives would be issued an “L-1A” visa. On the other hand, you have “L-1B” aliens who possess similar proprietary, sensitive knowledge or skill to that of an executive employee, but are not executives. Think, for example, of an alien who repairs a machine with patented parts or trade secret repair techniques that cannot be cross-trained. One argument for these visas is that they encourage business expansion in the United States. Companies' leadership could build offices and expand into the United States legally. In theory, their motivation could lead to investment in American jobs here.

In this sense, the L’s intended audience was something like the EB-5 investor visa that was designed to sell green cards to venture capitalists. If you were expanding offices and regions in the United States, you could plausibly “transfer” foreign national executives of your business to the United States under the L visa. This was under the guise that internal executive leadership knowledge and experience were highly specialized and could not be reasonably replaced within the existing native executive talent pool. 

It seems highly dubious that there aren’t American executives who could help foreign companies expand and grow in the United States. However, most corporate executive types have spent decades selling American workers down the river. So why do we care? Tata Consultancy Services and the lawsuit referenced above demonstrate why we should care about the L visa very much. Employers are classifying grunt workers as L visas because there is no numerical limit and no serious labor protections connected to the L visa. 

The L was designed for a very narrow group of highly specialized executive talent. Accordingly, there is little oversight or labor protection. Companies misclassifying front-line employees as executives to acquire L status do so only to pay foreign workers less money to do jobs Americans desperately need. And here is the kicker: There aren’t wage protections designed to keep L-1 labor from undercutting American workers. Employers can simply pay what they were paying their employees abroad, even though they’re working on U.S. soil.

There is no telling just how deep the L visa rabbit hole goes. I say that because the L visa has been a blinking red warning sign of fraud for decades. When you realize the government has known about this fraud and done nothing for decades, you can see why DOGE is not patient with people saying they should do it “the right way.” 

Section 415 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2005, Pub. L. 108-447, required that the Office of Inspector General (OIG) examine the vulnerabilities and potential abuses in the L-1 visa program. In January of 2006, OIG issued a report finding massive vulnerabilities within the program. Namely:

• First, the program allows for the transfer of managers and executives, but adjudicators often find it difficult to be confident that a firm truly intends to use an imported worker in such a capacity. 

• Second, the program allows for the transfer of workers with “specialized knowledge,” but the term is so broadly defined that adjudicators believe they have little choice but to approve almost all petitions. 

• Third, the transfer of L-1 workers requires that the petitioning firm is doing business abroad, but adjudicators in the United States have little ability to evaluate the substantiality of the foreign operation. 

• Fourth, the program encompasses petitioners who do not yet have, but are merely in the process of establishing, their first U.S. office. It also permits petitioners to transfer themselves to the United States. These two provisions, separately and in combination, represent "windows of opportunity" for some of the abuse that appears to be occurring. 

Phew! That’s a lot of problems to find in a little visa program 20 years ago. Surely, the bureaucrat experts in the permanent deep state did their due diligence and corrected these errors. Obviously, there would be no need for DOGE because deep state darlings are on the case as prudent stewards of the public trust. Right?

Fast forward to 2011, and Senator Chuck Grassley was writing to our Inspector General at DHS again. Yes, the OIG is informed by the Senator that:

“I have grown increasingly concerned that loopholes within the L-1 visa program have led to manipulation and broad overreach by those who use the program and have resulted in a great deal of fraud and abuse within the program.”

Well, the deep state was profoundly concerned, and so in August of 2013, the OIG published a new report on L visas. Remember, in the 2006 report, the second point referenced the impossibility of adjudicating “specialized knowledge” L-1B visas. Here is the 2013 update on how the government corrected itself:

“[Immigration Services Officers] ISOs informed us that even after receiving specialized knowledge training, they remain unable to apply the law and policy to L-1B petitions consistently. They described a class that they had recently taken as very generic. To increase the value of training, ISOs suggested that USCIS should use real life examples. USCIS has been developing specialized knowledge guidance to replace the outdated March 1994 memorandum.”

And:

“During this review, we determined that despite efforts to implement guidance that has been provided, confusion about the application of specialized knowledge still results in inconsistent adjudications.”

In summary, after roughly 10 years, two OIG reports, 2004 L-1 legislation, and a concerned letter by a Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the deep state at DHS had managed to make zero progress in clearly defining to staff what “specialized knowledge” meant for purposes of L visa adjudications.

You can say what you want about DOGE, but this is simple. The administrative state is incapable of reforming itself. I can help USCIS solve this issue right now. The L-1A informs specialized knowledge for purposes of L-1B. Executives have specialized knowledge due to their titles and positions. L-1B is capturing an employee who has the SAME privilege and knowledge as an executive. Congress drafted language, and DHS must interpret it reasonably and plausibly to give it full force and effect. It is not some daunting physics equation. Specialized knowledge in L means proprietary knowledge that executive management possesses.  

The problem is that DHS has never wanted to make decisions that would limit approvals. You cannot clearly interpret the statutes and rubber stamp approvals on autopilot. If “specialized knowledge” is interpreted narrowly to mean “knowledge like a management executive,” then many cheaper, lower-skilled workers could not be approved. Denials of applications beget appeals of denials beget calls from supervisors who are hearing from Congressmen who heard from the lobbyist who heard from the Chamber of Commerce Cheap Labor blob. 

It is just so much easier to approve your applications for the day and go home. That’s what DHS did for decades and is still doing. You do not have to support every decision DOGE makes to understand that the current oversight structure is a paper tiger. Inspectors General investigate issues, raise grave concerns, and offer prudent recommendations. Unfortunately, often nothing at all changes, and the cheap labor lobby continues to impoverish Americans. If DOGE can’t clean this up, I hope someone else can.