US scam hits South Asian, Romanian, Fijian asylum seekers

Updated June 30, 2009 08:20:59

A major case of immigration fraud involving Asian, Pacific and European asylum seekers has been uncovered in the United States. A federal court has convicted five people for their part in the long-running scheme... to defraud the US immigration service by filing hundreds of false asylum claims from 2000 through to 2004. It's said the conspiracy may result in up to a thousand asylum seekers having their permission to stay in the United States overturned.

Presenter: Geraldine Coutts
Speaker: Sam Stanton, Senior writer for the Sacramento Bee newspaper

STANTON: There were these three attorneys and two interpreters charged in an investigation that goes back to 2000. The government alleged that between 2000 and 2004 these folks would file asylum claims for immigrants from various nations and claim that they were suffering persecution in their homeland and therefore eligible for asylum. And what the government said was that they were completely phoney, that they made up the documents, they coached these asylum seekers on what to say when they got before immigration authorities and they ended up sending an undercover Romanian in to file for asylum who later testified that he had not faced any persecution whatsoever. So the government contends that as many as one-thousand people were granted asylum in this country under false pretences.

COUTTS: And can I just ask you do we know how many Fijians there are because this program is called Pacific Beat so we're interested in our area and they are the Fijians?

STANTON: We don't know how many there are from any of these countries, the bulk of them were from India and Romania, but there were also claims filed on behalf of Fijian and Nepali clients according to the government. But they haven't been able to give us any kind of breakdown of what we're talking about here. I think they're still investigating various asylum claims.

COUTTS: And so the lawyers and the interpreters who have been found guilty, what kind of sentences can they expect?

STANTON: Well they're looking at anywhere from two to five years and possibly more. The sentencing guidelines are very complex and they were all convicted of different counts. The only count that they all were found guilty of was the overarching claim of conspiracy to defraud the government, which is the main claim in this case. But it was very complex, there were something like 12-hundred exhibits introduced over the course of three months, and the defence contended that there was nothing wrong with these cases that they simply advised these asylum seekers on how to answer various questions and what to expect to be asked as they sought asylum. But the government contends that everything was made up, the doctor's notes that purported to be from say Romania were in fact produced by a computer in Sacramento and that their claims of persecution for various reasons simply didn't exist.

COUTTS: Now Sam Stanton it has been a huge case, three months long and it's been getting a bit of coverage in the United States. What impact is this having on the immigration department or the department responsible for asylum seekers, are they being asked now to lift their game?

STANTON: Well actually they're the ones who tricked to this investigation in the first place, what happened is an immigration inspector in San Francisco who just happened to be familiar with Romania noticed all of these applications coming in from these small towns in Romania and claims that didn't make any sense to him given his knowledge. So they started the investigation and ended up sending in this undercover operative. I mean there are people who believe that this type of thing has gone on for quite some time all over, but this is the first major case like this. And now what they have to do is decide whether to go back and review all one-thousand of these cases and eject these people from the country.