In the late nineties and up to say 2003, guest workers became a problem, but it included a lot of diversity...eastern Europeans, Latin Americans, Chinese, Korean in addition to Indian.

However, India as a country saw a potential gold mine and created an entire body shop industry based on giving people crash courses in various specialized technical topics, then helping them build impressive-sounding resumes that hyped their real experience.

I encountered these hyped resumes for the first time around 2001 when I needed to hire some developers. It took me a year or two to start thinking "Hey, what is it about Indians that allows them to have such amazing experience backgrounds compared to other people including very highly educated Americans?"

Yes, why Indians? I'd never found them to be inherently superior in any way. Actually, I always thought the eastern Europeans and many of the Americans were the smartest. I also worked with some amazing Chinese, including brilliant Chinese women.

And "Why are these Indian resumes so different from the others...yet they're so similar to each other?" I even found bunches of resumes with bullet points that matched...even matched each others' typos and ungrammatical phrases!

Indian resumes tended to include a string of jobs, usually contracts, that each lasted about the same length of time...usually three to six months with little or no gap between them. Non-Indian resumes, on the other hand, typically included some very long projects and FTE jobs, up to two years, mixed with shorter ones and typically including some gaps. The Indians typically did very similar tasks at each place, and the list of tasks and skills was always amazing. Funny, when non-Indians did three months somewhere they only did a few things and those things were clearly very company technology environment and project specific.

At some point I realized that the TRUSTING American system had been violated. We assumed that large agencies representing these people were basically honest and reputable, that they'd checked and verified their peoples' backgrounds. We did call listed references, but did not dig deeply, did not directly call former employers unless they were official references. We certainly never expected widespread fraud and deception.

YOU KNOW, IT WAS JUST LIKE THE BANKING CRISIS. Making money was good and greedy ("entrepreneurial") people were admirable. The culture of deception and fraud affected the body shop industry as much as it affected the big banks.