Making Noncitizens’ Rights Real: Evidence from Immigration Scam Complaints

Autor: Juan Pedroza
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Sociology and Political Science
bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Sociology|Race and Ethnicity
SocArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Sociology|Latina/o Sociology
bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Sociology|Demography
Population
and Ecology
SocArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Sociology|International Migration
bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Sociology
SocArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Sociology
bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Sociology|Tourism
bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Sociology|Criminology
bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences
SocArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Sociology|Racial and Ethnic Minorities
SocArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Sociology|Consumers and Consumption
bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Sociology|Place and Environment
SocArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences
SocArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Sociology|Population
SocArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Sociology|Crime
Law
and Deviance
Law
DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/hsd4a
Popis: 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 = 3,135 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, and 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 were 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.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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