Everyone knows that most H1-B visas are used up by Indian firms for Indian nationals. Not by American firms for international talent. All the politicians have known about this abuse for years but this part of US foreign policy and lobby group efforts. India is a considered a natural ally against China and the Muslims.
He's no different from the other Wall Street thugs. Though he being an outsider may stand out more and make an easier target for NYT compared to his other colleagues.
Mainstream media with its uncorroborated sources, strategic, timed, unsubstantiated and anonymous "leaks", often serving the interests of lobby groups policy makers, think tanks and intelligence agencies is hard to be believed. Even if the writer as good at the art of writing.
It depends on whether there are any checks so that such ranking systems are not abused. I know first hand that such systems are ripe for abuse by those who are connected. I know of an incident when a well connected long term employee performed very poorly and was put in the weeding out category. However because of his connections with Vice Presidents was able to engineer so that someone else was given his place in the ranking and fired. In a way a person was specifically hired to that team, reviews were engineered to give him a bad review in order to remove the well-connected but badly performing manager from the bottom list. This was not uncommon and would happen invariably in order to save the well connected but poorly performing person.