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U.S. employers keep roughly 600,000 foreign H-1B visa workers in jobs throughout the United States, according to an unprecedented report released by the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency.

The total number of resident H-1B workers has successfully been kept secret for decades, mainly because Fortune 500 companies do not want voters to recognize the massive outsourcing of jobs ...

For most of the year, the number of working H-1Bs was about 600,000, says the report, titled “H-1B Authorized-to-Work Population Estimate.”

The USCIS report admits that “no unique identifier exists for all H-1B petitions in the USCIS electronic [system of record, so] we use a methodology of statistical inference.”

“There is no count, so they had to estimate,” said John Miano, a lawyer at the Immigration Reform Law Institute. He said:

The whole thing is astounding. For years, [DHS] has deliberately not stored [visa worker] information into their databases. They only enter selected information into the computers. That was deliberate so that no one could know what is going on. We have sent in all kinds of [Freedom of Information Act] requests, and often the response is ‘we don’t keep track of that.’