Oakland Tribune
Sunday, January 30, 2000 10:02 AM MST

Landlord case fuels visa debate
By Matthew B. Stannard
STAFF WRITER

Allegations that a Berkeley landlord used temporary work permits to import young girls from India for sex and cheap labor are fueling a debate over whether the popular visa pro gram is a success, or a disaster in need of reform.

Federal prosecutors allege that Lakireddy Bali Reddy, 62, arranged for at least three young women to come into the United States so that he could continue a past sexual relation ship with them. Reddy's at torney has denied the charges, calling them "salacious and in flammatory."

But in some quarters, it is not the salacious sex charges against Reddy that are drawing attention, but the far less stimu lating immigration law charges that underlie them.

Prosecutors have said that Reddy and his son, Vijay Laki reddy, imported the women by abusing temporary skilled worker visas, called H1-B visas. They charge that Reddy ar ranged for an Indian man to re ceive an H1-B visa to work at a Berkeley computer company owned by Lakireddy. In return, prosecutors say, the man posed as father of two of the young women, allowing him to bring them into the United States with him.

Whether Reddy and Laki reddy are guilty or innocent probably will not be decided for months. But allegations that they abused the 10-year-old H1B program are already being picked up by critics who say the program is growing out of con trol.

"This is another demonstra tion that they should do nothing with further increasing this pro gram until INS has a better handle on who is coming in and what they're doing," said Jack Martin, special projects director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Wash ington lobby for immigration controls.

Martin said he plans to bring the Reddy case before Congress when he next lobbies against the H1-B program, which he said not only leads to exploitation of immigrant workers, but also discourages employers from re taining and retraining older American employees by allowing corporations to hire skilled for eign workers at entry-level wages.

Some of those concerns have been echoed by the Department of Labor, which in 1996 warned that some H1-B employers "ma nipulated the program to fill entry level jobs and positions."

Meanwhile, while INS and State Department officials say they are sure abuses like those Reddy is charged with are rare, they could not immediately say how rare -- an uncertainty Martin said supports his point.

"Nobody knows," he said. "The INS really does not keep any adequate tracking informa tion on the H1-B program, which is mind-boggling."

But the idea of curtailing the H1-B program makes others very nervous, particularly Sil icon Valley high-tech employers who helped push the cap for H1-B visas from 65,000 in 1998 to 115,000 this year and 107, 000 in 2001.

"H1-B visas have been very valuable to our industry, no question about that," said John Hatch, spokesman for the American Electronics Associa tion. "We're just not turning out enough college graduates in the disciplines we're talking about, the technology disciplines, to fill enough jobs."

While the debate rages, advo cates for immigrants worry that the allegations against Reddy will help trigger a backlash against all kinds of immigrant workers -- the bulk of whom they say are here legally. Worse, they say, the noise conceals deeper issues about how legal and illegal immigrant workers can be exploited by unscrupu lous employers.

"The more key issue to look at is the bigger issue of traf ficking of people," said Hina Shah, a labor rights attorney with the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco.

"A lot of people are very des perate in their home country and they are permitted passage to the United States ... what they don't realize they're signing on to is possibly involuntary servitude, possibly being chan neled into the sex trade," she said. "We're talking about slavery."
Son of landlord in sex case posts bail