Visa fraud: Pleasanton university founder convicted in immigration scheme

[alp227]

Source: San Jose Mercury News

SAN FRANCISCO -- In a case that highlighted the growing problem of so-called "visa mills," a federal jury on Monday convicted the founder and president of Tri-Valley University of dozens of fraud charges related to a multimillion dollar scheme to illegally provide immigration status to foreign nationals.

After two days of deliberations, the jury convicted Susan Su of 31 counts, ranging from conspiracy to commit visa fraud to money laundering to alien harboring in connection with allegations she ran a scam school in Pleasanton from 2008 until her arrest in 2011.

...

A federal grand jury indicted Su three years ago, alleging her university, which catered primarily to online students, was a bogus, unaccredited venture designed to rake in millions of dollars from foreigners who sought to obtain student visas so they could remain in the United States.

The Tri-Valley case prompted Sen. Dianne Feinstein and others to call for a crackdown on similar schools and a GAO report identified the school as the tip of the iceberg in a larger problem with visa fraud.

Read more: http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_25410172/visa-mills-federal-jury-convicts-founder-pleasanton-university

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Offered mostly business/engineering courses: http://web.archive.org/web/20090812024750/http://trivalleyuniversity.org/schedule.htm

[lupulin]

1. How does a student visa allow one to legally 'remain in the United States?'

[Lasher]

2. It doesn't indefinitely.

But some other form of legal status might be achieved before the student visa expires. Then there's the prospect of just staying after the visa expires. Each year in the US roughly half of all illegal immigrants are visa overstayers.