Immigration scams are a very particular type of fraud, where criminals target immigrants by virtue of their fear of being deported or otherwise having their status exploited.  The impact of immigration scams can be significant, not least as victims may feel extremely uneasy about reporting them to law enforcement agencies out of fear of alerting authorities to their presence.

Research from the University of California – Santa Cruz explores the extent of these crimes.  The study used data from the Federal Trade Commission, which showed that up to 700 immigration scams were reported each year between 2011 and 2014.  These are likely to be just the tip of the iceberg, however, although the researchers believe they can still be illustrative in giving us insight into the nature of the problem.

Most vulnerable

The study found particularly vulnerable communities when communities had greater access to the social safety net, which would typically include food stamps, immigration lawyers, and translation services.  The authors suggest that these services don’t facilitate more crimes themselves but do facilitate greater reporting of them.

“Positive experiences with the social safety net may potentially promote the idea that there are arms of the public sector that have your best interests in mind,” the researchers say. “And making sure that immigrants trust the public sector may be really important in helping people feel that reporting immigration scam crimes to law enforcement is a safe thing for them to do.”

For instance, cities such as Chicago and New York all reported higher-than-expected numbers of scam reports, while also having strong support services for immigrants.  Reports were much less common in communities with higher deportation rates and state laws targeting immigrants, despite these communities having high immigrant populations.

Correlation and causation

Of course, it’s quite possible that scammers are targeting areas with high immigrant numbers by looking at areas with high levels of support, but the authors cite previous work showing that scammers seem to target areas where legitimate immigrant services are thin on the ground.

There was, however, a strong correlation between the reporting of immigration scams and the reporting of anti-immigrant hate crimes.  Sadly this was not matched by higher arrests in a given community, however.

Of course, one considerable challenge is that the social and legal services available for immigrants are extremely unevenly distributed.  Indeed, the researchers believe that just 20% of US counties had good levels of access to food stamps for Hispanic households, with just one-eighth having multiple language interpretation options available for help communicating with law enforcement.

By expanding the services available so that more immigrant communities are reached, the researchers believe that the true scale of immigration scams will be revealed.  Indeed, this was even the case in areas where exclusionary policies existed.

“Even in places with policies that are exclusionary or hostile to immigrants, investing in access to legal services and social safety nets may still make a difference in immigration scam reporting,” the authors conclude. “And the alternative is clear: If we don’t invest in these things, scam artists have total impunity to innovate and take advantage, and we’ll never even know how often it’s happening unless we put in the work to make immigrants feel safe in reporting it.”