Gripping and horrific reporting of some low-cost birth hotels in Queen’s. Haven’t heard of comparable horror stories from Richmond birth hotels:
Dark circles formed like warning signs beneath Yu Fen Wang’s eyes as she worked 12-hour graveyard shifts in a Queens maternity center that operated on the margins of legality. Her family said she had grown gaunt, could not sleep and told her husband she no longer wanted to live.
Her employers, however, said they needed her to work. And her family needed the money. She earned less than $100 a day, they said, working in a private house that had been converted into a combined nursery and hotel for newborn babies and their mothers.
An open secret in the Flushing community, the center was part of an underground industry catering to a demanding clientele: local mothers resting after childbirth and Chinese visitors coming to have their babies in the United States, a practice known as “birth tourism.”
On Sept. 21, at 3:40 a.m., these dangers collided to near-fatal effect when, the police say, Mrs. Wang stabbed three babies sleeping in bassinets on the first floor — all girls — and two adults. She then turned the knife on her own neck and wrists.
The victims all survived. But the horrific act turned a spotlight on a pocket of immigrant New York, where a loose network of businesses tend to mothers and infants in the crucial, fragile month after childbirth but operate without any government oversight. The center, Mei Xin Care, is one of dozens in the area that vary widely in amenities and quality, leaving workers with few avenues for complaint, and families with little to guide them other than word of mouth, internet advertisements and blind trust.
“There are victims at all sides of the spectrum,” said Assemblyman Ron Kim, a Democrat who represents Queens.
Centers like this one — which was alternately known as Mei Bao, or “beautiful baby” in Chinese — provide two services. The first is for newly-arrived immigrant mothers practicing a Chinese tradition some 1,000 years old in which they recuperate for a month after childbirth while other women, often called “aunties,” care for their infants. Authorities said the centers also provide assistance to women from China who wish to give birth in the United States in order to obtain instant citizenship for their children, which is legal under immigration law.
There are some 40 such maternity centers — in private homes and apartments — advertising their services online in the New York and New Jersey area, and nearly 20 in the Flushing neighborhood.
At Mei Xin Care, employees were paid off the books, Mrs. Wang’s family said. One of its nannies, Darong Wang, 63, got the job despite being arrested in May for promoting prostitution at a massage parlor in downtown Flushing. She was slashed in the attack, requiring 20 stitches on her face; a father of one of the children was stabbed in the leg and wrist.
Stuffy and cramped
The crime took place in a three-floor brick apartment house with white metal lattice balconies on the outskirts of Flushing. Its only advertisement existed on the internet, on a Craigslist of sorts for the local Chinese immigrant community.
Mei Xin Care appears to be a combination of the names of two owners: Meiying Gao and Xuexin Lin. Local employment agencies said the owners had been in the business for about a decade but opened their latest location in 2016, when city records show they bought the building for $1.5 million. Reached by phone, the owners declined to comment.
One neighbor said in an interview that she saw a steady stream of clients arriving, sometimes in fancy cars.
Some of them would have been following the custom of a monthlong rest after childbirth. The period culminates in a “red egg celebration” to mark the baby’s survival of its fragile first weeks, said Margaret M. Chin, a professor of sociology in the Asian American Studies program at Hunter College.
The centers are an alternative to obtaining visas so family members can fly to the United States, or returning to China, where health care is often less sophisticated. For several thousand dollars, new mothers have access to 24-hour nannies and cooks.
Michael Cheng and his Shanghai-born wife, who live in Flushing, considered using the center for her recuperation period. They toured the facility twice in the spring and were quoted a fee of $4,800 — in cash.
Mr. Cheng said babies were sleeping on the first floor, while their mothers slept in small bedrooms on the second and third floors.
He remembered seeing five to six workers, whom he estimated to be in their 40s and 50s. “They were working 24 hours in shifts,” he said. “I can imagine that it was a very high-stress job.”
Mr. Cheng said his wife, who did not want to give her name, spoke with some of the residents on the upper floors, one from China and another who was a New Yorker. “Before we walked out, I was like, ‘Are you sure you like this place?’ to my wife,” Mr. Cheng said in an interview. “To me, it felt stuffy in there.”
He was skeptical and asked to see a license. The owners sent a copy of a generic business operation certificate and another for maternity nutrition.
“In hindsight,” he said, “if there was more talk about these places, and people knew if you go to one of these centers that they had to hang their licenses right out in front, some kind of regulations around that, maybe it would help.”
Ultimately, the couple felt uneasy about Mei Xin Care and opted to spend the month at Mr. Cheng’s parents’ home on Long Island after their daughter was born. They got their $800 deposit back when another mother quickly filled the spot.
A shortcut to U.S. citizenship
After the stabbings occurred, Flushing was in an uproar. At temples, in food courts and on the streets beneath bright signs in Chinese, residents worried that the incident would stir up anti-immigrant attitudes toward their community.
Others decried the center’s second purpose, easing the path for birth tourism. “They should not come through loopholes,” said Catherine Chan, 50, a bar owner in Queens who used to work on Wall Street. She came to the United States from China when she was 6, after a long process involving family sponsorship, she said. “There is no shortcut.”
Birth tourism is a well-known phenomenon. In recent years, it has drawn mostly well-off mothers from China, Korea, Russia, Turkey, Egypt and Nigeria to the United States for birthright citizenship, which President Trump has vowed to eliminate.
It can be legal, as long as pregnant foreigners applying for visas state their intention to give birth when they are in the United States and prove that they can cover the cost. If they conceal their real purpose for traveling they could be subject to visa fraud.
Once United States citizens turn 21, they are eligible to sponsor a parent for a green card, giving their parents the option of eventually settling there. Parents do not always use that opportunity, and immigration officials could deny a green card, claiming the parents had willingly defrauded the American government.
Many are more concerned about securing the future of their children who, as American citizens, have the option of schooling in the United States or in competitive private Chinese schools that have lower entry standards for foreign students. They can travel to other countries without having to apply for a visa. It is seen as a status symbol in China.
For Chinese birth tourists, Los Angeles is the marquee destination. Centers compete with each other by advertising stays at plush hotels, shopping extravaganzas in nearby malls, and state-of-the-art hospitals. Fees can range from $50,000 to $80,000.
In 2015, immigration enforcement authorities raided the Los Angeles centers, saying owners had avoided paying taxes.
Still, the raids did not deter business owners who saw an opportunity. As Chinese internet services like Weibo and WeChat expanded, so did advertisements for birth tourism services in New York.
In the New York metropolitan area, more upscale maternity centers tend to exist in New Jersey and Long Island suburbs. The ones in Flushing appear to be smaller, and less expensive, options, where mothers stay in rooms that often have been subdivided.
Annie Gao, the owner of one upscale birth center in Center Moriches, on Long Island, expressed disdain for the cramped and somewhat secretive operations of the Flushing centers.
Ms. Gao, who opened her center in Flushing in 2004, said that several years ago she tried to convince other owners to join an association that could self-regulate and keep out cut-rate, potentially unsafe, centers. Ms. Gao thought that some centers skimped on food quality and cleaning services, noting that ones she had seen looked “dirty.”
An advertisement for Mei Xin Care, also known as Mei Bao, claims the center has been legally registered for more than 10 years and provides five meals a day to new mothers.Credit
But those owners disagreed, she said.
These centers elude city and state licensing categories and zoning codes. They do not qualify as day care centers because mothers are on-site; they do not need a medical license because owners offer Chinese nutritional practices.
“There isn’t a real category for these type of activities, and they were able to leverage it and apply for a general business license and pretend that was O.K. for their clients,” Mr. Kim, the assemblyman, said.
Although neighbors of Mei Xin Care filed complaints that it was operating as a hotel, city buildings inspectors were denied access three times, which automatically closes the complaint. Neighbors can file an affidavit to warrant a full inspection, but city records show that did not happen.
The state Office of Child and Family Services, the city’s administration for Children’s Services, the state Department of Health and the city Department of Health all said such centers did not fall under their purview.
The police shut down Mei Xin Care after the stabbing, but less than three weeks later, the center seemed to have reopened. Women could be seen through the windows, and a pile of diapers sat outside…
Not surprising. Self-imposed rather than responding to external events:
Two years in, President Donald Trump’s promised immigration crackdown is hardly on pace to deliver his stated goal of deporting up to 3 million people. But it has produced something else: gaping budget holes that the administrationhas scrambled to fill.
Since taking office, the president has repeatedly ordered sweeping and often improvised changes that gave federal agencies a greater stake in immigration enforcement but muddled their missions. The sudden policy shifts sparked self-inflicted crises that regularly required band-aid solutions far more expensive than the status quo. And to pay for it all, the administration pulled money from federal agencies that have nothing to do with immigration ― including cancer research, Head Start and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It’s policymaking for the Trump era: rushed, chaotic, expensive — and ultimately self-defeating.
A Tent Camp For The Price Of A Luxury Hotel
Perhaps the most glaring example of the wastefulness of the White House’s approach is the creation of the tent shelter for migrant children at Tornillo, Texas. The administration had the camp hastily erected in Juneas an emergency measure to shelter 400 unaccompanied minors and children it had separated from their families at the border. The Tornillo contract was supposed to expire in September. But as the month wound to a close, officials decided to keep the facility open to solve a new crisis of the administration’s own making.
Because sponsors are often unauthorized immigrants themselves and therefore reluctant to be fingerprinted by federal agencies, the outcome was predictable: More children are stuck in shelters for longer periods of time. The system, run by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, is currently housing more than 13,000 of them — about five times as many as a year ago. So instead of shutting down the Tornillo tent camp, the Trump administration is packing more children into it, with plans to hold as many as 3,800 minors.
The expected cost: $750 per night, per bed. For about the same price, the federal government could pay for a deluxe hotel room — with a view of Central Park — at Trump’s Manhattan hotel. For every month that the Trump administration locks up a single undocumented minor in the Texas desert, it pays more than the annual cost of putting a student through state college, complete with room and board.
The policy of fingerprinting sponsors and sharing that information with ICE didn’t exist when Congress approved the HHS budget. But the government is still stuck with the bill. To cover the gap, HHS reshuffled about $260 million last month from other parts of its budget, as Yahoo! News first reported. Among the losers in the battle of priorities are cancer research ($13.3 million), Head Start preschool ($16.7 million) and HIV prevention ($5.7 million).
Improvising A Bigger Detention System
Trump’s improvised crackdown blew a similar hole in the ICE budget.
Within a week of taking office, Trump signed an executive order eliminating arrest priorities set by the outgoing Obama administration. Instead of focusing on detaining recent border-crossers, people with serious crimes or those who had been deported in the past, the White House freed the agency to arrest any unauthorized immigrant its agents find. The mandate was clear: Arrest more migrants.
ICE did just that. The agency’s immigration arrests jumped 42 percent over the first eight months after Trump took office. Immigration arrests jumped an additional 17 percent over the first three quarters of this fiscal year, to nearly 120,000, ICE’s most recent data show. More than a third of those people ICE arrested had no criminal convictions, meaning they wouldn’t have been arrested under the Obama-era guidelines Trump scrapped.
Indiscriminate arrests make intuitive sense for a politician who campaigned as an enforcement hard-liner. But they’re an inefficient way of removing unauthorized immigrants from the country. People without serious criminal records or deportation orders are typically entitled to a hearing. Because the immigration court backlog has ballooned by more than 48 percent over the last two years to 764,000 cases, it often takes years to get new arrestees in front of an immigration judge.
“They’re overwhelming us,” Dana Leigh Marks, a spokeswoman for the National Association of Immigration Judges, told HuffPost. “The number of immigration cases coming in continues to be crippling to the court.”
All of those new arrestees waiting for hearings are straining the immigration detention system. Congress last year showered nearly 1 billion new dollars on ICE — a windfall larger than the previous six years of budget boosts combined. But that budget gave the agency only enough money to lock up an average of 38,000people facing deportation per day. ICE blew past that by 2,000 beds in average daily capacity.
So, just like HHS, the Department of Homeland Security, which is ICE’s parent agency, had to reshuffle about $200 million last month to make up the shortfall. The most public loser was FEMA, which lost $10 million just as Hurricane Florence barreled toward North Carolina.
To fund detention and deportation operations, Homeland Security pulled $13 million from Homeland Security Investigation’s domestic investigation budget and an additional $270,000 from its international operations. The Coast Guard and Transportation Security Administration coughed up tens of millions each.
“They’ve put the cart in front of the horse here,” former ICE official Alonzo Peña said. “They’re going to do these programs and figure out how to pay for it afterwards.”
The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of referring all migrants caught crossing the border illegally for criminal prosecution is also both expensive and inefficient. At an average daily bed cost of $80 per prisoner — not to mention the costs of judges and public defenders required to make the policy work — the Justice Department is spending hundreds of millions of dollars detaining and prosecuting people the Department of Homeland Security aims to deport anyway.
So Damn Much Money… And Not Much To Show For It
The irony of the Trump administration’s approach is that, by all the most obvious metrics, it has failed to meet its goals. With the first three quarters of this year tallied, ICE is on track to deport about 250,000 migrants — well below the more than 409,000 removals registered in 2012.
You’re robbing one piece of the immigration system to feed that beast of the detention system. Those are tough decisions that Congress will be forced to make.Tracey Valerio, ICE’s former head of management
Likewise, with one month left to tally for the fiscal year, arrests for illegal border crossings stand at about 355,000. Those numbers are among the lowest registered since the 1970s. But they’re up, modestly, over the previous year, indicating that Trump’s massive spending — aimed squarely at scaring potential migrants from trying to cross the border — isn’t working.
Congress, firmly in Republican control, has so far declined to halt the agency’s backdoor expansion of the immigrant detention system or its evolving prioritization of petty immigration arrests over investigative work.
“You’re robbing one piece of the immigration system to feed that beast of the detention system,” Tracey Valerio, ICE’s former head of management, said. “Those are tough decisions that Congress will be forced to make.”
DHS funding legislation winding its way through Congress suggests the plan is to throw still more money at the problem. If passed, Congress would shovel another quarter billion dollars into ICE next year — a small increase compared to either last year or to what the White House asked for, but still well above any other year since 2012.
But until that new funding bill passes, the Trump administration is left shuffling money around to pay for its immigration agenda. Even Trump has had to curb his ambitions to pay for his administration’s haphazard policymaking. Last month, DHS yanked $26 million that Customs and Border Protection had earmarked for “border security fencing, infrastructure and technology” and gave it to ICE. It was money for Trump’s promised border wall.
Consistent with other restrictive measures (Canada does not offer a waiver to lower income immigrants despite the 5 fold increase in citizenship fees in 2014-15):
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services is proposing changing the eligibility for fee waivers for lower-income immigrants on the path to legal permanent residency and U.S. citizenship.Immigration advocates say the move is like building an “invisible wall.”
USCIS announced the change Friday in the Federal Register. Receiving means-tested public benefits from the states would no longer result in automatic USCIS fee waivers, the proposal states. Instead, fee waivers would only be tied to two criteria: the federal poverty threshold or particular financial hardships.
The change is necessary, USCIS said, because “eligibility for these benefits can vary from state to state, depending on the state’s income level guidelines,” meaning that “individuals who would not otherwise qualify under the poverty-guideline threshold and financial hardship criteria have been granted fee waivers.”
The new proposal restricts waivers only to applicants who are at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty threshold or financial hardship.
“It’s a significant narrowing of those who would be eligible for the fee waiver. Our estimates indicate that this would reduce the total population of those eligible for a fee waiver by two-thirds,” said Jill Marie Bussey, advocacy director for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network. “It’s an extremely troubling proposal for our network.”
CLINIC’s 330 affiliates provide pro bono immigration services to thousands of low-income immigrants across the United States. Bussey said 95 percent of CLINIC’s affiliates assist with fee waiver applications.
For 2018, a four-person family in California is eligible for means-tested state benefits with a household income at or below $50,200. Thus, an immigrant household at that income level and receiving state means-tested benefits are currently eligible for a USCIS fee waiver.
But with the proposed change, that same four-person Californian household would only be eligible for the USCIS fee waiver if household income was at or below $37,650.
USCIS is like the U.S. Postal Service in that most of its funding comes from fees paid for its services, rather than from U.S. taxpayers.
USCIS fees for immigrants to use its services can run into the thousands. The application for a “green card”, formally known as the “application to register permanent residence,” costs $1,140. The application for naturalization to become a U.S. citizen costs $640.
The waiver proposal is an attempt to reverse a change to immigration policy under President Barack Obama. In 2011, USCIS standardized a process of using means-tested benefits as a way to prove eligibility for its fee waivers.
“When this agency waives fees, it’s hurtful to the quality of the agency and it pushes fees off from one population to another. If you can’t get fees from group A, then you have to run up the fees for groups B, C, and D. So there is a reason to be careful with waivers,” said David North, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank advocating for low immigration.
“The change works against and secures some fee money from the near poor while leaving the poor untouched. So this is not a program that rolls back benefits for the really poor people, it rolls back benefits for some of the working poor and the income level above that,” North said.
CLINIC’s Bussey said the proposal is like an “invisible wall,” “a back-door way of limiting family immigration and reunification.” She fears it will suppress naturalization rates
“And that hurts us all. Studies really show that low-income immigrants are able to improve their financial status through naturalization. They have access to better jobs, educational opportunities and resources,” she said. “So limiting access to naturalization through limiting this fee waiver creates a poverty loop.”
North said the fees make sense because U.S. legal status brings “admission to the labor market, for instance, where you can make as much money as you want or can.”
The proposed change is open for comment until Nov. 27. Public comments have to be taken into consideration when finalizing a federal government rule change but may not necessarily be incorporated into its outcome.
Nice charts and analysis. While I am far from being a libertarian, Cato Institute analysts do some really good work in this area:
America is a nation of immigrants, and throughout its history, it has received nearly 100 million immigrants. I almost wrote that America “welcomed” them, but the fact is that very few of those 100 million were broadly popular with the public when they arrived. They came nonetheless. They thrived, and those immigrants—at least those who stuck it out in the face of harassment and discrimination—and their descendants built the country that we have today.
The term “immigrants” refers to foreigners who come to the United States with the intention to settle permanently. They are distinct from “nonimmigrants” who make temporary visits to the country, such as tourists, students, and guest workers. Figure 1 provides the breakdown of immigrants by the last legal status that the immigrant held. An illegal immigrant who receives legal permanent residency is listed as a legal immigrant, even though he may have entered illegally or lived illegally in the United States at some point. It includes all immigrants since the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783, but does not include slaves imported involuntarily to the United States (the legal slave trade ended in 1808).
Figure 2 breaks down the number of new legal permanent residents admitted annually from 1783 to 2018. The bars show the absolute figures and the line the number as a share of the U.S. population. The government didn’t collect annual statistics prior to 1820, but a general consensus appears to have arrived at about 250,000 immigrants from 1783 to 1819. I estimated the annual figures for the period by assuming a modest jump after the French Revolution in 1789, a significant jump in 1793-94 following the Haitian Revolution, a significant decline during the Napoleonic Wars, and an almost total elimination during the War of 1812. These assumptions produced period averages similar to those estimated in American Immigration by Maldwyn Allen Jones and which accord with other accounts of the period.
The average number of new legal immigrants per year from 1783 to 2017 was 370,169, and the average immigration rate was 0.4 percent of the population—that’d be the equivalent of 1.3 million people in 2018. For context, the United States is on pace to admit about 1 million new immigrants in 2018 or 0.32 percent of its population.
The estimate for the number of illegal immigrants is much more tentative for obvious reasons. About 11.3 million immigrants without legal status show up in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey in 2016. Broadly reliable estimates of the illegal population exist back to1980. While relatively few people immigrated illegally prior to the 1980s, I estimated amounts using the available evidence. Based on estimates of the mortality and emigration rates of illegal immigrants in recent years, we can conclude that about 1.4 million immigrants died without status and 6.4 million illegal immigrants voluntarily emigrated. In addition to these, about 2.4 million were deported. It would be reasonable to increase these figures by 10 to 20 percent, but the overall picture of U.S. immigration in Figure 1 would hold.
America’s tradition of receiving people from around the world is admirable, but as Figure 2 shows, the rate of legal immigration right now is still far lower than its historic highs in the 19th and early 20th century. America can not only easily sustain a much higher rate of legal immigration than what it permits at the moment—it would benefit greatly from a much higher rate.
The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to step in and block two top officials from having to speak under oath in a lawsuit challenging the administration’s decision to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 Census.
In a petition filed Wednesday, the Justice Department asked the high court to prevent Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and John Gore, the acting head of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, from having to sit for depositions in the case. A coalition of activist groups, cities and nearly 20 states, led by New York, say the Trump administration was predisposed to adding the citizenship question, and say it violated federal law by not following the proper procedure for doing so.
Getting information from Ross and Gore is crucial to the lawsuit because Ross, who oversees the Census, has said he added the question at the request of the Justice Department. DOJ said it needed the question, which has not been asked on the decennial survey since 1950, to get better citizenship data so it can better enforce the Voting Rights Act. But documents disclosed as part of the litigation show that Ross wanted to add the citizenship question even before the Justice Department requested it, and that it was Ross who initially approached DOJ officials about making the request.
Critics say adding the citizenship question will depress the response rate among immigrants who fear sharing their immigration status with the Trump administration. Data collected by the Census is strongly protected by federal privacy laws and must be kept confidential.
A lower court in New York has ordered depositions of Ross and Gore, saying they possess unique and relevant information that can’t be obtained from other sources. In its Wednesday filing, the government said the lower court’s ruling was incorrect, and that the case should be evaluated based on an “administrative record” of documents compiled by the government detailing why it made its decision.
“The court thought Secretary Ross’s testimony uniquely vital because he was personally involved in the decision to reinstate a citizenship question and the decision is of great importance to the public,” U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco wrote in the brief. “The Secretary’s personal involvement in a significant policy decision is not exceptional, and the importance of the Secretary’s decision in this case does not distinguish it from many other decisions of national importance that Cabinet Secretaries make.”
The information that the government has disclosed in the lawsuit so far has raised significant questions about the decision to add the citizenship query. The documents show Ross and top aides discussing the addition of the citizenship question, and a memo in which the bureau’s top scientist advised against adding it.
Justice Department lawyers have been fighting to block the plaintiffs in the case from gathering information beyond the documents that government officials voluntarily compiled about the decision. However, they have been largely unsuccessful. On Sunday, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman, the trial judge overseeing the case, said the government’s most recent request was “particularly frivolous — if not outrageous.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit is also considering whether to block Ross from having to sit for a deposition, but said last week that Gore could be deposed. A trial in the case is scheduled to begin at the start of November.
“The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to block discovery in our suit ― and courts have repeatedly rejected their attempts. You have to wonder what they’re trying to hide,” said Amy Spitalnick, a spokeswoman for New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood (D). “We’ll get to the bottom of how the decision to demand citizenship status was made, as we continue our case to ensure a full and fair Census.”
Quite a contrast with Canada where the “immigration industry” is characterized by service provider organizations, immigration lawyers and academics in contrast to business interests in the USA:
An interactive website which investigates the rising investment in detention, enforcement, and deportation of immigrant families in the U.S has been released by a group of researchers and academics this week.
The virtual resource charts financial contracts that the U.S government has with companies to supply goods and services required for detention, surveillance, and deportation of immigrants. This includes everything from IT supplies and services for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices, toiletries for detainees and even ammunition and taser accessories.
The website was co-built by Associate Professor Rachel Hendery from Western Sydney University’s Digital Humanities Research Group. Associate Professor Hendery contributed to the programming, design and analysis work for the platform.
The interactive data exploration reveals that ICE government contract values have increased 987 percent since 2014— and they have almost doubled in the past year.
Associate Professor Hendery said the research found the U.S government and businesses are heavily profiting from the detainment of immigrants.
“Businesses like Deloitte have various ICE contracts which collectively amount to $250 Million— and they aren’t the biggest,” Associate Professor Hendery said.
“Amazon, LinkedIn and Dell are just some of the household names of organisations that are a part of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement ‘industry’.
“I don’t think people are aware of the scale of this immigration prison industry, nor that it really is an industry, with all kinds of financial and other incentives for the status quo to continue, or as our data suggests, scale up even further,” she said.
The map is divided into ‘visualisations’ which provide different data on the financial industry of the immigration system. The visualisations include:
Monetary amounts of ICE contracts in each congressional district
ICE contracts from 2014-2018 showing the exponential growth of economic activity within the immigration system.
An exposé of some of the most egregious participants in the ICE economy.
An in-depth look at the expenditure categories for ICE contracts.
Re-displacements from the US since 2012 by port of removal.
A map of allies, double vetted for trustworthiness.
Professor Hendery said that maps and other interactive data visualisations that were used in the project help extract narratives from complex figures in a way that looking at numbers does not.
“Most people reading or hearing about immigration in the U.S are operating without all the information. It’s hard to understand how large the ICE machinery is, or what the scale of their financial web is like.”
The research makes up the second volume of the Torn Apart/ Separados project which provides a deep and radically new look at the culpability behind the humanitarian crisis in the United States. The project is made up of an interdisciplinary cohort of researchers around the world who combine technical skills and classical research practices to help mobilise humanity.
Good and interesting data analysis with equally good data visualization:
The part of this city east of Northgate Mall looks like many of the neighborhoods that surround it, with its modest midcentury homes beneath dogwood and Douglas fir trees.
Whatever distinguishes this place is invisible from the street. But it appears that poor children who grow up here — to a greater degree than children living even a mile away — have good odds of escaping poverty over the course of their lives.
Believing this, officials in the Seattle Housing Authority are offering some families with housing vouchers extra rent money and help to find a home here: between 100th and 115th Streets, east of Meridian, west of 35th Avenue. Officials drew these lines, and boundaries around several other Seattle neighborhoods, using highly detailed research on the economic fortunes of children in nearly every neighborhood in America.
The research has shown that where children live matters deeply in whether they prosper as adults. On Monday the Census Bureau, in collaboration with researchers at Harvard and Brown, published nationwide data that will make it possible to pinpoint — down to the census tract, a level relevant to individual families — where children of all backgrounds have the best shot at getting ahead.
This work, years in the making, seeks to bring the abstract promise of big data to the real lives of children. Across the country, city officials and philanthropists who have dreamed of such a map are planning how to use it. They’re hoping it can help crack open a problem, the persistence of neighborhood disadvantage, that has been resistant to government interventions and good intentions for years.
Nationwide, the variation is striking. Children raised in poor families in some neighborhoods of Memphis went on to make just $16,000 a year in their adult households; children from families of similar means living in parts of the Minneapolis suburbs ended up making four times as much.
The local disparities, however, are the most curious, and the most compelling to policymakers. In one of the tracts just north of Seattle’s 115th Street — a place that looks similarly leafy, with access to the same middle school — poor children went on to households earning about $5,000 less per year than children raised in Northgate. They were more likely to be incarcerated and less likely to be employed.
The researchers believe much of this variation is driven by the neighborhoods themselves, not by differences in what brings people to live in them. The more years children spend in a good neighborhood, the greater the benefits they receive. And what matters, the researchers find, is a hyper-local setting: the environment within about half a mile of a child’s home.
At that scale, these patterns — a refinement of previous research at the county level — have become much less theoretical, and easier to act on.
Image
A map used by the Seattle Housing Authority identifies neighborhoods, shaded in purple, where housing officials and researchers believe that poor children have particularly good odds of rising out of poverty.CreditSeattle Housing Authority
“That’s exciting and inspiring and daunting in some ways that we’re actually talking about real families, about kids growing up in different neighborhoods based on this data,” said the Harvard economist Raj Chetty, one of the project’s researchers, along with Nathaniel Hendren at Harvard, John N. Friedman at Brown, and Maggie R. Jones and Sonya R. Porter at the Census Bureau.
The Seattle and King County housing authorities are testing whether they can leverage their voucher programs to move families to where opportunity already exists. In Charlotte, where poverty is deeper and more widespread, community leaders are hoping to nurse opportunity where it’s missing.
In other communities, the researchers envision that this mapping could help identify sites for new Head Start centers, or neighborhoods for “Opportunity Zones” created by the 2017 tax law. Children from low-opportunity neighborhoods, they suggest, could merit priority for selective high schools.
For any government program or community grant that targets a specific place, this data proposes a better way to pick those places — one based not on neighborhood poverty levels, but on whether we expect children will escape poverty as adults.
That metric is both more specific and more mysterious. Researchers still don’t understand exactly what leads some neighborhoods to nurture children, although they point to characteristics like more employed adults and two-parent families that are common among such places. Other features like school boundary lines and poverty levels often cited as indicators of good neighborhoods explain only half of the variation here.
“These things are now possible to think about in a different way than you thought about them before,” said Greg Russ, the head of the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority, which is also planning to use the data. “Is opportunity a block away? These are the kind of questions we can ask.”
The answers shown here are based on the adult earnings of 20.5 million children, captured in anonymous, individual-level census and tax data that links each child with his or her parents. That data covers nearly all children in America born between 1978 and 1983, although the map here illustrates the subset of those children raised in poorer families. The research offers a time-lapse view of what happened to them: who became a teenage mother, who went to prison, who wound up in the middle class, and who remained trapped in poverty for another generation.
Few of the children from Northgate still live in the neighborhood, but the data traces their outcomes as adults today back to the place that helped shape them…
While not necessarily a perfect analysis as some of the comments indicate, far closer to the truth than the Trump administration political rhetoric. Same likely applies in Canada save for the parents and grandparents category:
President Donald Trump has repeatedly condemned U.S. immigration policy, arguing that many immigrants pose a threat to the nation and drain U.S. resources. But a study released Monday about health insurance challenges the president’s portrayal.
The study in the journal Health Affairs found that immigrants covered by private health insurance and their employers contributed nearly $25 billion more in premiums in 2014 than was spent on their care. Those in the country without legal status contributed nearly $8 billion toward the surplus.
In contrast, U.S.-born enrollees spent nearly $25 billion more than they paid for in premiums.
These findings surface as the Trump administration’s immigration policies — including a plan to tie migrants’ efforts to get permission for permanent residency to their use of federal benefit programs — have come under scrutiny.
Earlier studies also found that immigrants contribute more to Medicare than they receive in benefits, but the authors of this study say it is the first to look at the effect in private insurance plans.
Leah Zallman, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and lead author of the study, said her findings allude to the potentially negative consequences that tighter immigration policies could have on the health care industry.
“I think in today’s era … there’s so much concern about immigrants and immigration really sort of draining our resources in the U.S.,” Zallman said. “This really points to the critical role that immigrants have in actually subsidizing and maintaining our current systems.”
Researchers calculated the financial contributions and expenses of enrollees and their employers using two surveys created by the federal government. Plans sold on the federal health law’s insurance exchanges were not included because they “differ from other private insurance in important ways and are unavailable to undocumented people,” the study authors noted.
Anyone born outside of the United States was categorized as an immigrant. However, the surveys did not ask non-citizens with private coverage about their legal status. Researchers used national data on undocumented immigrants to estimate how many people in the study group illegally resided in the country.
In 2014, immigrants and their employers contributed $88.7 billion in private insurance premiums, but spent only $64 billion for care, according to the study’s findings. Of that group, undocumented immigrants alone paid more than $17 billion to private insurers but used only $9.4 billion.
Native-born consumers paid $616 billion in premiums and received nearly $641 billion in insurers’ payments for care. They also consistently outspent immigrants across all age groups. Among enrollees 65 and older, the U.S.-born made a net contribution of nearly $10,000 more toward their care than those born overseas, according to the study.
The researchers reported that, on average, individual immigrants paid $1,123 more for premiums in 2014 than they received in insurance-covered care. U.S. natives instead cost insurers $163 on average.
Leighton Ku, director of the Center for Health Policy Research at George Washington University who was not involved in the study, said several factors contribute to immigrants’ low health care expenses. The group tends to be healthier and younger when they arrive in the United States. Cultural and language differences also hinder them from accessing care.
The study noted that immigrants’ health care expenditures increased the longer they remained in the country. But it added that since their premiums also increased at the same time, they continued to make a net contribution to their private health plans.
The findings come about a week after the Department of Homeland Security proposed redefining how it would determine “public charge,” a term used to describe a person likely to become dependent on the government for assistance. The proposal would make it harder for immigrants to live and work permanently in the U.S. if they receive certain types of federal assistance, such as Medicaid, food stamps and housing subsidies.
Trump has vowed to be tough on immigration standards. During his campaign, he berated U.S. health expenditures on immigrants, arguing that the U.S. spent $11 billion for care to people who were in the country without authorization, the study’s authors note.
But they point out that earlier research shows that immigrants have low rates of health care use and spending, compared with native residents. Their payments to private plans and Medicare in essence prop up care for patients who are U.S.-born, the authors say.
A study Zallman published earlier showed unauthorized immigrants contributed $35.1 billion more to Medicare from 2000 to 2011 than they used in services.
Benedic Ippolito, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, cautioned using the study’s findings to draw conclusions on a large scale about immigrants and their role in health insurance. An estimated 20 percent of immigrants — including nearly half of the undocumented population — are uninsured, according to the study. Ippolito said the cost of their uncompensated care affects whether immigrants’ financial contributions actually lead to surpluses for health care overall.
“I would be careful about how much I extrapolate these results to a) other parts of the health insurance market and b) even further to what this means for immigration policy,” Ippolito said. “This paper alone does not tell us everything we need to know.”
Ku echoed the uncertainty. He said he is not certain how the Trump administration’s latest actions will affect immigrants enrolled in private insurance. Having a private plan may suggest they are employed with a certain income stability. However, if enough immigrants leave the insurance market, he added, it may have the unintended consequence of making health plans more expensive for everyone else.
“That does have the following implication that to the extent that we do things to suppress immigrants or make it harder for them to purchase insurance then in that case we may do harm to the citizens,” he said.
One of the better pieces I have seen on the potential impact of these changes, from a former staffer at the Obama White House:
On September 22, 2018, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a notice of proposed rulemaking that could have a dramatic impact on immigrants, temporary visa holders and U.S. employers. If fully implemented, the “public charge rule,” as it is known, could be the most far-reaching immigration policy change made during Donald Trump’s time in office.
To better understand the proposed rule and its potential impact, I interviewed Doug Rand, who served as assistant director for entrepreneurship at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (September 2010 to January 2017) and is president and co-founder of the technology startup Boundless.
Stuart Anderson: Under current law, what does the term public charge mean?
Doug Rand: Congress long ago established that the U.S. government can deny certain green cards and temporary visas to anyone who “is likely at any time to become a public charge” – but without defining precisely what “public charge” means. The law allows immigration officers to “at a minimum consider the alien’s age; health; family status; assets, resources and financial status; and education and skills.” They can also consider a sworn statement of financial support from a sponsoring relative and, in fact, this “affidavit of support” is required for many family-based green card applications.
Anderson: How is public charge currently applied?
Rand: There have been periods of confusion, especially after major immigration and welfare reform bills were passed by Congress in 1996. Even though the new laws did not prohibit immigrants from using public services, such as emergency rooms and school lunch programs, families read the headlines and became worried.
In 1999, to clear things up, immigration officers adopted the guiding principle that a public charge is a foreign national with “the likelihood of . . . becoming primarily dependent on the government for subsistence,” as evidenced by use of a short list of government benefits: cash assistance (“welfare”), Supplementary Security Income (SSI) for the disabled, or assistance for long-term institutional care like a nursing home or mental health institution.
Anderson: How has that affected immigrants and visa applicants so far?
Rand: Very few people have traditionally been denied a green card or temporary visa on public charge grounds for two primary reasons.
First, Congress has already barred most non-citizens from using welfare, SSI, and non-emergency Medicaid, so that’s not an issue.
Second, Congress requires most green card applicants to have a financial sponsor – typically a family member who is a U.S. citizen – who declares their willingness and ability to support their relative and prevent them from becoming dependent on government benefits. So, under current rules, you know you won’t be considered “likely to become a public charge” as long as you have a sponsor who demonstrates income greater than 125% of the federal poverty guidelines (currently $20,575 for most couples without children).
Anderson: What is different in the new DHS proposed rule?
Rand: DHS wants to turn more than a century of precedent on its head. Instead of keeping the current definition of a “public charge” as someone “primarily dependent on the government for subsistence,” DHS would start denying green cards and temporary visas to anyone who is deemed likely at any time in the future to receive any government benefit from a specified list.
Anderson: What would that mean in practice?
Rand: Most press coverage so far has focused on the expanded list of government benefits that would be off-limits for the first time. Basically, you can’t touch food stamps, federal housing and rental assistance, non-emergency Medicaid benefits, or Medicare Part D healthcare subsidies – even if you’re eligible for these programs – without taking on the risk that DHS denies your green card or visa application down the road.
But that’s just the beginning. Remember, immigration officers have to determine whether someone is “likely to become a public charge” at any point in the future, and actual use of government programs is only one of some 15 factors that DHS wants to start scrutinizing.
Any of the following factors could become a “negative factor” that convinces DHS you are likely to become a public charge:
Prior or current use of certain public benefits.
Being older than 61.
Being younger than 18.
Having any medical condition that could interfere with school or work.
Not having sufficient resources to cover such a medical condition.
Not having private health insurance.
Having several children or other dependents.
Having financial liabilities.
Having “bad credit” or a low credit score.
Having no employment history.
Not having a high school diploma or higher education.
Not having “adequate education and skills” to hold a job.
Not speaking English.
Receiving an application fee waiver from DHS.
Having a sworn financial sponsor whom DHS feels is “unlikely” to follow.
The only way to sail above this thicket of new criteria would be to demonstrate a household income above 250% of the federal poverty guidelines. That’s currently $41,150 for a couple with no children and $73,550 for a family of five.
Anderson: How does this rule affect the practices of the Department of State and the Department of Justice?
Rand: For the most part, DHS only decides who gets to stay in the United States, by deciding whether to approve or deny applications for extensions and change of status (i.e., international student to H-1B), or applications for green cards from people who are already here. But it’s clear in this latest rule proposal that DHS wants these heightened public charge standards to also be adopted by the State Department, which decides who gets to come to the United States from abroad. (The State Department has already instructed its consular officers to apply a stricter set of public charge standards since January 2018, but the DHS rule is even more demanding and the ultimate plan is for the two agencies to be in lockstep.)
Then there’s the Department of Justice, which largely decides which permanent residents could be deported on public charge grounds. Historically, if you had a green card, this wasn’t something you had to worry about. But the Trump administration just quietly revealed that the Department of Justice intends to issue its own “parallel rulemaking” on deportability that would mirror the new and expanded DHS standards.
Anderson: How could the rule affect a U.S. employer or a temporary visa holder?
Rand: First, there are the direct effects. A U.S. employer is going to find it more difficult and much less predictable to extend the status of a highly skilled worker on an H-1B visa or to help switch a key recruit from a student visa to an H-1B. Unless the employer is paying the worker more than that newly made-up threshold – 250% of the poverty line – they might not be able to renew their work visa and stay in the United States. Assuming $73,550 for a family of five, that’s potentially going to be some portion of H-1B professionals.
Then there’s the bureaucratic cost. By DHS’s own estimate, its new public charge rule would affect over 500,000 temporary visa applications each year and compliance costs could top $1.3 billion over the next decade. And that’s a huge underestimate if the State Department starts applying the same standards to millions of applicants abroad.
It’s probably going to take longer for employers to get applications approved because a number of applicants may be required to submit an entirely new form (the I-944, or “Declaration of Self-Sufficiency”) and accompanying evidence. USCIS adjudicators and consular officers will have to sift through these new forms to make complex and subjective public charge determinations, which could create delays even for those not subject to the new requirements.
Anderson: Will adjudicators look only at benefits used after the date the final regulation is published?
Rand: Yes, the proposed rule is clear that nobody should be penalized for using public benefits until DHS implements a final regulation and officially puts these benefits off-limits, which won’t happen until next year at the earliest. That’s a really important point for people to understand, that nothing has changed yet.
Anderson: Is there a way for an applicant to know ahead of time if their application is likely to be approved?
Rand: There’s always some uncertainty involved in any application, since immigration officers exercise a fair amount of case-by-case discretion. But the DHS public charge plan would turbo-charge that uncertainty by introducing so many new factors for officers to scrutinize. DHS is demanding that its officers go beyond the usual determination of eligibility for a given green card or visa category and engage in fortune-telling: Is this applicant likely to be financially vulnerable at any point in their natural lives? If so, then deny the application.
Anderson: If a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident petitions for their spouse, how could their spouse be denied under the rule and what would be the consequences of that denial?
Rand: We asked ourselves this question at Boundless, since we assist married couples who apply for spousal green cards. We evaluated our own customers as a reasonably representative sample of the marriage green cards issued each year and estimated how many of them would fall below the new income threshold that the public charge rule would impose. Remember, that’s 250% of the federal poverty guidelines, currently over $41,000 for most couples without children.
Anderson: How would a parent, adult child or sibling be denied under the rule?
Rand: It’s possible even more parents of U.S. citizens would be denied than spouses. If you look at the list of new criteria DHS wants to impose, a great many parents could be denied on the basis of age, income, medical condition or English proficiency. The Migration Policy Institute used Census data to estimate the impact of the 250% income threshold and found that some 56% of all family-based green card applicants could be denied.
Anderson: What is the role of sponsors under the rule?
Rand: Ironically, the DHS proposal doesn’t directly change the role of a sponsor – whether that’s a U.S. citizen or permanent resident sponsoring a family member, or a U.S. employer sponsoring a worker. However, by heaping new scrutiny on the health, financial condition and other aspects of the applicant, DHS would effectively minimize the role of the sponsor in assuring that the applicant has a high chance of getting their visa or green card approved.
Anderson: Do you expect there will be legal challenges to the rule? When do you expect the rule could take effect?
Rand: Given that just about every other immigration policy executed by this administration has been challenged in court, it would be odd if the public charge rule were an exception. But that won’t happen immediately.
First, after DHS officially publishes this proposed rule, it will be open for public comments for 60 days. After that, DHS has to read through all of the public comments, prepare a response to each substantive concern, and potentially make major changes to its regulatory plan and economic impact analysis. This process usually takes a long time – six months would be light speed, and well over a year isn’t uncommon for a complex regulation like this. Only then would DHS publish the “final rule” and, if it’s not blocked by a federal judge, then it would take effect.
Anderson: What do you think is the biggest problem with the rule?
Rand: When it comes to the public charge standards, the status quo policy has served us well. Congress already decided who’s eligible for public benefits and who isn’t, and established a clear income threshold for sponsors.
The proposed rule is designed to impede and reduce legal immigration. Never in our nation’s history have we said that you have to be comfortably middle class to become an American. We didn’t say that to Alexander Hamilton, or Andrew Carnegie, or the founders of Google and WhatsApp, or countless other immigrants who came here with next to nothing, worked hard and made this country great.
NPR’s Planet Money has learned that more than 13,500 immigrants, mostly Chinese, who were granted asylum status years ago by the U.S. government, are facing possible deportation.
As the Trump administration turns away asylum-seekers at the border under more restrictive guidance issued by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Executive Office for Immigration Review are considering stripping asylum status from immigrants who won it years ago.
Immigration officials are moving against these immigrants in a sweeping review that federal authorities say is related to a 2012 investigation into asylum mills. During that probe, federal prosecutors in New York rounded up 30 immigration lawyers, paralegals and interpreters who had helped immigrants fraudulently obtain asylum in Manhattan’s Chinatown and in Flushing, Queens. The case was dubbed Operation Fiction Writer.
The federal government says the people convicted during Operation Fiction Writer had helped more than 3,500 immigrants, most of them Chinese, win asylum. Authorities accused them of dumping boilerplate language in stories of persecution, coaching clients to memorize and recite fictitious details to asylum officers, and fabricating documents to buttress the fake asylum claims.
In the years after the prosecutions, immigration officials have been reviewing those asylum cases to determine which clients lied on their asylum applications and therefore should be deported.
One of those rounded up during Operation Fiction Writer cooperated with authorities on the investigation. The man, who asked that we call him Lawrence, helped the government between 2011 and 2014. He says that he worked for lawyers who reassured their clients that they would be fine if they fabricated their claims of persecution in China and that those clients were just heeding legal advice.
He is in hiding now because of the government’s escalating demands that he continue cooperating — this time against those former clients. Planet Money spoke with him on Skype but does not know his exact location.
Lawrence, a Chinese immigrant himself, says the government pressured him in the past couple of years to help review asylum cases he may have worked on as an employee at more than one law firm. He helped with that effort initially but has backed away as the number of people the government is targeting has skyrocketed.
Lawrence says that he didn’t have a problem helping law enforcement arrest lawyers in 2012, but that he feels very different about helping law enforcement punish immigrants years after they won asylum.
“Because targets are different,” he says. “Those Chinese immigrants — those clients … their attorney just tell lie to them, to do that.”
The way Lawrence tells it, he is fighting a larger battle now against government agencies that are mixing up what is legal with what is right. He wants no part in helping the government use the letter of the law to strip asylum from people who won it years ago — even if that means he has to remain in hiding.
Lawrence says his disappearance will make it much harder for immigration officials to possibly deport thousands more people back to China, a country that he says does not treat people who had sought asylum kindly.
An unprecedented review
In a written statement, USCIS confirmed the substance of Lawrence’s story — that immigration officials are now reviewing 3,500 asylum cases handled years ago by the people convicted during Operation Fiction Writer. Immigration authorities also confirm that they are reviewing the asylum cases of more than 10,000 family members who were granted what is called “derivative asylum status.”
Therefore, in total, more than 13,500 immigrants who were granted asylum before December 2012 could lose it.
At the time the prosecution was announced in 2012, officials in the Obama administration, including then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara, decided not to criminally prosecute any clients.
Today, “USCIS, ICE Office of the Principal Legal Advisor and the Executive Office of Immigration Review are reviewing these cases to maintain the integrity in our nation’s asylum system and to ensure that the original asylum grant was lawfully obtained,” says Katherine Tichacek, a spokeswoman for USCIS, in a written statement.
It isn’t unusual for immigration officials to review the case of a former client whose lawyer has been convicted of asylum fraud. But immigration lawyers say they have never seen officials systematically review old asylum cases on a scale like this in ICE’s history.
It is hard to say exactly how many of the cases handled by the guilty lawyers were in fact fraudulent. Fact-checking each requires confirming claims and stories that allegedly happened years ago, in other countries with separate legal systems.
Tichacek explained that when an old asylum case is flagged during this review for potential fraud, lawyers at ICE will file a motion to reopen the case with the Executive Office of Immigration Review. If an immigration judge grants the motion, the asylee is granted a hearing. The judge will then reaffirm the grant of asylum or terminate asylum status.
“The agencies are reviewing each case file and making lawful determinations in accordance with due process of law,” says Tichacek.
Someone whose case is “reopened” can pay thousands of dollars in legal fees to defend against the allegations, even if there was no fraud.
An immigrant’s struggle in New York — and an opportunity
In July 2005, Lawrence boarded a plane from China to New York City. In his mind back then, there was no question how his new life in America would turn out. “I think I would become millionaire … or something like that,” he says. “I always quite have a lot of confidence in myself.”
But Lawrence remembers his first year in the U.S. as a horrible year. He fell into a miserable string of odd jobs working illegally in the Flushing area — at a window and door company, at a glass factory and elsewhere.
Then in January 2007, he saw an ad in the paper: An immigration law office right next to Chinatown needed a Chinese translator. He faxed his résumé over, and they called him up immediately to ask him when he could start.
It turned out that the tiny law office specialized in asylum cases. Lawrence soon would learn that he had dropped into a world with huge stakes.
Asylum is a fast, direct path to staying in the country. It is hard to win, but if you do, you get immediate permission to work. You’re also eligible for a green card within a year — and then citizenship five years after that.
For years, the Chinese have won more asylum cases than immigrants from any other country. About 22 percent of the 20,455 individuals granted asylum in 2016 were Chinese immigrants, according to the most recent figures from USCIS. The next largest group is immigrants from El Salvador (10 percent) and then immigrants from Guatemala (about 9 percent).
The lawyer who ran the immigration office Lawrence joined back in 2007 was named Ken Giles. Lawrence says Giles’ law office had only three desks, crammed into a tiny room. Everything that happened, Lawrence says, happened out in the open.
“I realized this is open secret in Chinese immigrant community … many Chinese people making asylum fraud,” he says.
According to Lawrence, a client would walk in and tell the office manager that he or she would like to try for asylum because that is what a friend or relative suggested.
“The office manager would talk to the client about what kind of claim they should pursue and what kind of story they should make up, what kind of fake document they should provide,” says Lawrence. “And [the manager] made up those stories. She wrote them down and asked those client to copy it in their own words.”
One reason Chinese immigrants have been successful at winning asylum is because the most common stories submitted by Chinese applicants fit neatly into the criteria asylum officers and immigration judges use to grant asylum.
In the U.S., before you can get asylum, the government wants to hear a story from you — a story about “a well-founded fear of persecution.” That persecution has to be based on your race, religion or political opinion, or on some “particular social group” you belong to — and it has to have been targeted specifically against you.
Central American immigrants have had a tougher time for years getting asylum based on claims that they are fleeing criminal gang violence because it’s harder to prove that a threat is targeted or that the government is doing nothing to stop it. Chinese immigrants don’t have that problem — their most common asylum stories involve being targeted by the government.
The claims have fallen into three buckets: persecution under the country’s family planning policies, persecution by the government based on the person’s religion — usually Christianity or their membership in the spiritual sect Falun Gong — or persecution by the government based on the person’s activism in favor of democracy.
Inside the asylum mills
The way Lawrence tells it, he watched and learned the ins and outs of the asylum fraud business in Ken Giles’ office. About a year and a half later, he says he ended up at an even bigger operation: A law firm run by a woman named Feng Ling Liu.
Like Ken Giles, Lawrence says, she focused almost exclusively on asylum cases. Lawrence compared the office to a factory, with each worker having a designated task, whether it be translating, coaching or story-writing.
Lawrence says he started as a story writer at Feng Ling Liu’s firm. He would begin with certain details about a client that were actually true and weave them into a larger drama of government persecution. Lawrence learned that the stories had to be vivid and tell tales of great suffering. And only certain kinds of suffering, the kind that checked off the correct boxes, would do: targeted persecution, by the government, that was based on religion, politics or China’s family planning policy.
Lawrence estimates he wrote 500 to 600 fake stories for clients over the course of a couple of years. He compiled a massive study guide for coaches to use with clients. And he made the law firm’s interpreters collect field data for the guide — profiling asylum officers by what the kinds of questions they tended to ask and the answers they seemed to prefer.
Lawrence says he started rationalizing his behavior at this point: “Sometime I justify in this way: I say, ‘Okay, I’m helping people. I’m helping those lower-class Chinese people to get their status in United States. They don’t really commit crime. … What they want, just find a job here and work in the Chinese restaurant.’ ”
Around November 2010, Feng Ling Liu’s office fired Lawrence. He says they were tired of dealing with his part-time schedule. So a few months later, Lawrence found himself back at Ken Giles’ office, helping out with a few asylum cases.
It was spring 2011. That was when Lawrence met Zhenyi Li, an immigrant who had run out of ways to stay in the U.S. when her aunt told her, “go do asylum.”
“It felt like people all around me were doing it — people I worked with, people in my circles,” says Li. “From what I could tell, applying for asylum to stay in this country was just a normal thing to do.”
To Lawrence, Li was like a jackpot client. She was young, 29, and college-educated. Also Li had chosen to get an abortion back in China and had gone to church occasionally while growing up.
These were useful facts Lawrence could play with in her application. Within days, he had crafted a lurid asylum story for Li, recounting a brutal abortion forced by the Chinese government and a violent crackdown on Li’s Christianity.
Today, when Lawrence revisits this story, he starts laughing.
“I wrote so many ridiculous cases on daily basis,” he says. “For those asylum officers and those immigration judge, they are buried by this kind of fake story every day, so they don’t know what real story should be looking like.”
When Li first read the story, she wanted to laugh. “I thought, ‘This isn’t my story. It was not me,’ ” she says. “It was so exaggerated. So made-up. This was not my life.”
Li was granted asylum on June 28, 2011, on her first try.
Investigators make their pitch
Two weeks before Thanksgiving, Lawrence got a phone call from the FBI. He would soon learn, he says, that the FBI had been tailing him for more than a year. The agents told him that a big raid was coming and that there was nothing Lawrence could do to stop it. They told him he could either join his colleagues in prison, or he could help the FBI.
He says he agreed to cooperate immediately.
“I just felt so depressed for what I did for the last couple years,” he says. “And then I all of sudden find, find a chance to tell everything. To outburst it.”
He gave the bureau a detailed picture of all the people involved in pumping out fraudulent asylum applications in Chinatown and Flushing. He pored over photo books to identify suspects. He turned over his study guide, which plainly laid out every step of the fraud from story-writing to evidence-fabrication to interview prep.
He went back into the asylum mills wearing a hidden camera, making 16 secret recordings in all. His goal was to catch as many people as possible. One of his first targets was Ken Giles. And Lawrence helped flip three more people who became cooperating witnesses.
One of them was Li, who says the agents offered her a deal.
“They said that they wouldn’t prosecute me if I cooperated. And they offered to help me with immigration. They said they would tell immigration officials I helped the FBI,” says Li. “They said I might not be better off if I cooperated, but that I certainly wouldn’t be worse off.”
In 2014, Feng Ling Liu was tried and found guilty of conspiracy to commit immigration fraud. She could not be reached for comment. Ken Giles pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit immigration fraud and was sentenced to two years in prison.
In a recent interview, Giles maintains he never advised a client to lie on an asylum application.
“I never told anybody to pretend to be anything. Never,” says Giles. “That’s a lie. That is a lie.”
If there was coaching by anyone else in his office, Giles says he wouldn’t know because he doesn’t speak Chinese. But he says he pleaded guilty because he felt like he had no choice.
As for Lawrence, he discovered that cooperating witnesses don’t get to just start over.
The federal government decided to charge him with three felonies — two counts of immigration fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit immigration fraud — which meant it would be much harder for him to ever become a U.S. citizen. He faced a maximum of 25 years in prison, but the judge gave him credit for his cooperation and he was sentenced to just six months probation.
Multicultural Meanderings 