Immigration fraud comes in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes it is massive, sometimes just one-on-one; sometimes it is crude and direct, and sometimes very complex. But usually employers of aliens are not the victims, and the population of the United States usually is illicitly expanded.
The last two generalizations were not true in a half-million-dollar case brought in federal district court in New Jersey recently.
Complex and Indirect Fraud. The indicted (but not yet tried) malefactor worked for years inside a big law firm that helped two of its corporate clients (outplacement firms) get H-1B workers (presumably to lower their costs) and to help those firms from time to time to convert the H-1Bs to green card status.
That person, Marijan Cvjeticanin, first as a paralegal and after 2010 as a lawyer, managed the flow of paper and money for the immigration practice; as part of his job he handled the requirement in the employment-based green card program that the employer was supposed to run classified ads regarding job vacancies so that qualified American workers could be considered along with the prospective green card holder (presumably in most cases an
H-1B already on staff).
Cvjeticanin managed to steer this ad-placement business to a firm that he (silently) owned, Flowerson Advertising. Flowerson then sent the corporations invoices showing that the ads had appeared, but in most cases no ads were purchased. According to the indictment, he pocketed $579,000 in this manner from 2010 to September 2012, when the (not very observant) law firm found out about the ownership of Flowerson and fired Cvjeticanin for conflict of interest. ComputerWorld was often the place where the ads were supposed to appear.
There are several troubling and interesting aspects to this case.
First, there is the comprehensive sense of laxity that flows over the whole process. Why did not the clients — and the Labor Department — require that physical copies of the ads, the clippings, be submitted with the applications? That would seem to be so basic as to be beyond discussion.
Second, why did the law firm not manage its own operation better?
The sad answer, not to be found in the Joe Friday-prose-style indictment, is that the whole recruitment process is a congressionally created fraud; there is no real effort made by anyone to see to it that residents (citizens and green card holders) are actually considered for the job in question; the whole "recruitment" process is a show, and the ads are just part of the make-believe. No wonder no one was paying attention to the question: Were these ads actually placed?
For a devastating little video of a law firm briefing clients on how to manipulate the resident "recruitment" process to avoid hiring Americans in cases like these, watch this. It feels a little like watching Governor Romney make his 47 percent statement, except the camera work is better.
Getting back to the details of the alleged New Jersey crime, any connoisseur of immigration fraud would recognize immediately that while Cvjeticanin's plot was completely dishonest, you have to admit it was also creative. Further, and unlike so much lawyer fraud in the immigration business, its victims were not the (usually) low-income illegal aliens, it was the plush employers. A bit of Robin Hood, in other words.
And, to make an even more nuanced point, the plot did not swell the population of the United States, it simply converted some existing non-immigrant workers to immigrant workers, a process that was bound to take place whether the ads were actually placed or not.
Despite these observations, I am glad the authorities caught up with him, presumably aided by the unnamed law firm.
Crude and Direct Fraud. The complex dance in this case reminded me of some quite different bits of immigration fraud I encountered some 30 years ago when I was running the first-ever government-funded survey of illegal aliens for the Department of Labor. These techniques were blunt, direct, and successful in that each one added (at least momentarily) to the illegal alien population of the United States.
We talked with numerous illegals who had simply lied at ports of entry about their citizenship; you could enter the nation with a "verbal statement of citizenship" in those days. No more.
And then there was one guy, young, agile, and slim as I recall, whose fraudulent entrance technique was unusual to say the least. He would go to a pedestrian gate at a port of entry at a particularly busy time of day and slip past the immigration inspector while the latter was interviewing someone else. I think he did this at both Nogales and at San Ysidro. Not admirable, of course, but quite an accomplishment.
I am grateful to a Midwestern reader for a tip about the New Jersey case.
