Wild Wild East

About the Book

A FORENSIC AND DEEPLY HUMAN EXPOSE OF HOW THE H-1B VISA PROGRAMME BECAME A VAST, INSTITUTIONALISED SCAM

This is the story of three men-Kumar Pandruvada, Virgil Bierschwale and Manu Mitra-ravaged by the vagaries of the H-1B visa programme. It is also the story of two nations, of transcontinental human trafficking, of corporate and immigration fraud, of wage violations so enormous that their official amount over the last two decades reaches at least $121.48 million. The real figure must be a hundred times more, at a conservative estimate.

Wild Wild East unveils a scam that affects millions of American and Indian workers. A scam sustained and abetted-directly or indirectly-by thousands of firms, American politicians, think tanks, mainstream media, accrediting organisations, universities. Tanul Thakur, an ex-H-1B worker, spent eight years investigating byzantine connections to unearth a story of dizzying depth and scope.

This exposé-spanning Big Tech giants, outsourcing behemoths, mom-and-pop body shops, educational consultancies, visa mills and federal agencies-dismantles long-held myths about the Indian IT boom and American exceptionalism. It spotlights survivors, dissects data, probes history, parses court records and questions the law. Shunning simplistic notions underpinning high-skilled immigration, which frame migrant and domestic workers as adversaries, this trailblazing book has the mind of a muckraker and the heart of a novel.

About the Author

Tanul Thakur is an award-winning journalist and film critic. In 2015, he won the National Film Award for Best Film Critic-the youngest critic to receive the honour. Over a dozen media outlets have interviewed him on cinema, culture and the H-1B programme, including the Washington Post, the Hindu, the Economist, Financial Times, BBC and CNN. Wild Wild East is his first book.