Instagram is one of the world’s most popular social media networks, known for its easy-to-use interface for sharing photographs. Indeed, in December 2014, the company was valued at $35 billion, according to Citigroup analysts. Back in April 2015, Business Insider published an article claiming that the company “almost lost one of its cofounders because he couldn’t get a work visa.” A native of Brazil, Mike Krieger is a co-founder and the chief technology officer at Instagram. According to the article, Mr. Krieger had difficulty transferring his H-1B visa from his previous employer, Meebo, to Instagram in 2010. The process is said to have taken Mr. Krieger over three months—longer than it took to develop the first version of Instagram! Mr. Krieger said he almost was not able to work at Instagram because of the delay, and the article goes onto conflate Mr. Krieger’s visa delay with the annual H-1B cap and lottery.

Earlier this spring, the incredible story of Liana Kristina Barrientos was all over the news. According to numerous sources, Ms. Barrientos had married at least ten men over an eleven-year period, claiming on each marriage application to have never been married before, and without obtaining divorces from the prior husbands (well, at least some of them). News sources openly speculated that the marriages were entered into for immigration benefits, pointing out the criminal investigation about Ms. Barrientos’s polygamy had been initiated following a tip from investigators from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which administers immigration benefits through US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) and investigates and prosecutes immigration law violations through Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE). Ms. Barrientos, a native of the Dominican Republic and a US citizen, allegedly married the men in order for them to obtain Green Cards. The men were identified only by their initials and their countries of origin.