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Making noncitizens' rights real: Evidence from immigration scam complaints

Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: Noncitizens seeking to make sense of US immigration systems encounter a labyrinth of information and deception. This paper is the first national study of scams targeting noncitizens seeking immigration legal services. I construct a county‐year database (N = 3135 over a four‐year time period, 2011–2014) across secondary data sources to analyze the correlates of immigration scam complaints submitted to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). I find that welcoming counties have more immigration scam complaints, while counties with exclusionary contexts tend to have fewer complaints. The results do not suggest that scams are more prevalent in welcoming contexts, because the actual number of scams is unknown. Instead, we can conclude that noncitizens tend to come forward to report immigration scams in welcoming contexts of reception, even after accounting for exclusionary policies. A robust safety net proved the most reliable predictor of immigration scams reported to the FTC. The concentration of immigration attorneys, legal aid services, and language access was also positively associated with the number of FTC scam reports. Taken together, these results suggest that immigrant‐serving capacity and access to key services support noncitizens who report immigration scams, while hostility toward immigrants may deter them from exercising those same rights.
Source: Law & Policy
DOI: 10.1111/lapo.12180
Language: English
Subfield: Urban Studies
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4207052562
FWCI: 2.438
Cites: 96
Cited by: 6
Related to: 10