Thursday, November 28, 2002 By Matt
Hayes
After he’d gone 90 days without payment, my law firm
informed Shihad that we could do no more on his case until he made a
payment. He pulled a wad of food stamps our of his wallet and said, "Give
me some time to sell these."
Shihad, who’d won his asylum case a few months
earlier, might have been eligible for food stamps, but he wasn't eligible
to sell them. No one is. It's a crime. "Shihad," I said, "I'm withdrawing.
You're trying to pay me with the proceeds of a crime."
The commonness of food stamp fraud among America's new
immigrants is staggering. Many recent immigrants do not even understand
that selling food stamps is a crime, representing, as they do, a form of
individualized assistance. Most look at food stamps as just one more thing
to barter, so for between 10 and 80 cents on the dollar, they are
converted to cash. Never mind that the food stamp was invented to prevent
public assistance, formerly given in cash, from being frittered away on
non-food items.
How much money is lost each year to food stamp fraud?
About $30 million, according to the best estimate provided by the
Washington Department of Social and Health Services. But recent immigrants
are not just selling the food stamps they receive, they profit from it,
too.
Large scale food stamp fraud came to light in an
explosive way in 1996, when authorities in Ohio discovered that a
Jordanian man and his uncle had deposited $24 million in purchased food
stamps in the bank accounts associated with their chain of food and video
stores. Just before authorities descended on them with arrest warrants,
they deeded their property over to their wives, which included $300,000
homes, and fled to Jordan.
More recently, food stamp fraud has been refined by
"asylees" -- asylum seekers -- fleeing Somalia, where rampant starvation
serves as the basis of those asylum claims. Asylees are one of a very
small number of immigrant groups who are normally eligible for food
stamps. Last year, according to documents filed by the U.S. Attorney's
Office with the District Court in Seattle, Wash., a ring of Somali couples
based in Washington leveraged their skills into a multi-layered public
assistance fraud that even involved cash payments from the government. One
of the couples netted $40,000 in food stamp fraud alone. Be comforted that
the United States was not their only victim. The ring claimed residences
on both sides of the border, and Canada, too, was taken for many tens of
thousands of dollars.
Food stamp fraud has taken on more sinister dimensions
within the last year and a half. Last autumn, the FBI determined that the
Somali asylee community in Seattle, set with food stamps and other forms
of public assistance, was targeted by the Al-Barakaat Wire Transfer
company, a wire transfer and hawala banking outfit with known connections
to Al Qaeda. Al-Barakaat set up a storefront in Seattle and immediately
went to work selling Qat, a mild narcotic popular with Somalis, and
converting food stamps to money for Somalis to send back to their
relatives in Somalia. The FBI believes Al-Barakaat skimmed tens of
millions of dollars off of the proceeds of these two activities, and
funneled it directly to Al Qaeda.
According to the testimony provided by New York City
detectives to a U.S. Senate subcommittee in connection with the 1993 World
Trade Center bombing, corporate America has been victimized by precisely
the same dynamic with coupon fraud, unwittingly funding terrorism by as
much as $125 million annually.
Financial relationships of trust -- applications for
public assistance that require the truthful disclosure of income
information, a store's capacity to deposit for payment only those food
stamps that have actually been exchanged for food or coupons that have
been presented in connection with the actual sale of a consumer item --
are often completely alien to new immigrants. Many new immigrants have
told me that they simply cannot believe that the government trusts them to
honestly provide their income information on a food stamp application.
America is entirely too loose with its money, and its
new immigrants know it. As recent raids and prosecutions have shown,
greater oversight of programs like the one that makes food stamps readily
available to new immigrants is crucial. A week after I told Shihad that
I'd filed to withdraw from his case, he returned to get a copy of his
file. He'd been able to sell the food stamps, he told me, and had received
enough to retain a new lawyer.
Matt Hayes began practicing immigration law shortly
after graduating from Pace University School of Law in 1994, representing
new immigrants in civil and criminal matters. He recently left the New
York City law practice he founded in 1997 for the "more normal life" of
insurance defense, and is co-author of The New Immigration Law and
Practice, a textbook to be pubished by West Legal Publications in
October, 2003. |