We need to talk about immigration fraud in the Latino community
We can text about it, too. Actually, that works even better! I did an experiment with Groundsource’s text service and found out that yes, the community will open up to journalists if the approach and the interface are right.
H., 32, had been waiting 40 minutes for someone to approach her on a street corner on Roosevelt Avenue in Flushing, Queens. She decided to take action and walked into five or six businesses asking “Hispanic-looking employees” where she could get “fake papers.” Recently arrived in New York from a Latino country, she had just landed a job as a server at a restaurant in Brooklyn. But the manager told her he could hire her only if she had a Social Security number (SSN) and a green card.
“He told me to bring a photo to a corner and wait until someone offered me fake documents, just like people in Chinatown offer fake designer bags on the street,” she said. “He made it sound like a very normal thing to do.”
H. is among the 8 million immigrants — 5% of the country’s workforce — who worked in the United States in 2018 without government authorization, according to the Internal Revenue Service. In 2015, they paid $23.6 billion in income taxes.
You don’t notice those people, but they are all around you: cooking your take-out meals; planting the corn in the tortilla you are eating; cleaning the apartment next door; fixing you a $13 tropical drink. Unauthorized workers make up 50 percent of farmworkers. In the service industry, which includes jobs like the one H. found, they make up 9 percent. Many obtain fake Social Security cards and green cards so they can work on the books. They pay taxes without ever becoming eligible for the benefits.
As a quite friendly Brazilian who has been living in New York for over three years, I have met nationals whose homelands range from Guatemala to Uruguay, coming from different social classes, education levels and age groups. I can tell you President Trump’s rhetoric against Latino immigrants does not deter them from coming to the U.S. — not one bit — because they all know that, once they get here, they will find work.
If you want to get to the roots of a social problem, you have to dig deep. After studying green-card marriages for four months, I realized that an immigration fraud industry exists in this country, feeding off the Latino community (and possibly, many others).
It was then that I decided to test Groundsource.
Groundsource helps organizations reach audiences and communities on their phones, creating a conversation via text message that leads to solid two-way relationships through mobile messaging and voice.
On this post, I talked about a late-night train ride in Brooklyn, where 13 out of the 21 people in my car were looking at their phones or tablets or wearing earbuds — which does not necessarily mean they were listening to anything, but still. Most of us fall asleep next to our devices and are awakened by them in the morning.
If you are not married or living with a partner, odds are your most intimate relationship is with your phone.
During our Community Engagement course in the social journalism graduate program, we were given access to Groundsource’s text service.
My idea was to use it to collect information about immigrants who use fake documents in the U.S. It was also a way to start a conversation about immigration fraud that was not about green-card marriages — a topic that I realized, from the Hearken experiment, made people sensitive. (I was kicked out of a Brazilian WhatsApp group after sharing the link to the Hearken voting round. I don’t blame them. It’s Social Journalism 101: don’t be the reporter who parachutes in a community!)
The call-out
I will talk about the experiment not in the chronological order in which it was developed, but in the order in which the user experienced it.
I established IMMIGRATION as the text-service key word, which means people would text that word to Groundsource’s number to start the conversation.
A quick note: this was the call-out’s second version. The first did not mention that it was open to everyone. I added that after feedback from people who thought only undocumented immigrants were supposed to participate. Great lesson: people will look for excuses to NOT DO something if they feel it is not going to be about them.
The conversation
Once users texted IMMIGRATION, a short conversation would start. Since it was my first time reaching out to the community through this platform, I was careful not to be too demanding or time-consuming. Here is how they received it:
Thank you for participating! My name is Isadora Varejao and I am a journalism graduate student at CUNY, in New York. I am working on a project about the Latinx community (Brazilians, Mexicans, Caribbeans, etc) with immigration issues, and how journalists can be of help. The information you share with me will be confidential, and so will be your contact number. How many Latinx people do you know who have worked using a fake U.S. Social Security number?
From my Hearken experiment, I learned that a social journalist must be absolutely clear about what she will do with the information given to her. So I made sure to explain that the project entailed finding ways journalists could help people with immigration issues and reassured the anonymity of the process. Had anyone been a little suspicious of my being an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in disguise, this would iron things out.
I also chose to start out by assuming that someone who wanted to participate would know someone who had worked with a fake SSN. The idea was to make it sound, as H. said, “like a very normal thing,” as bias-free as possible.
The person would respond and, in return, receive this:
Thank you. In 2015 undocumented immigrants paid $23.6 billion in income taxes to the IRS. A lot of money, right? Another question: How many (if any) people do you know have paid someone to marry them to obtain a green card?
What I did here was thank the user for the information shared by talking about undocumented immigrants in an “elevating way.” I also made it sound like a very normal thing to do, too — not because I approve of immigration fraud, but because we know that the way you phrase your question may influence the interviewee’s response.
Next:
Okay! If you do know people, how many of them are women?
After all, my project is about women.
Do you have any questions about the topic or any other information you would like to share?
I wanted to give users the opportunity to vent, gossip and feel that whatever they wanted to share would be appreciated.
Are you Latino?
This was an important one. Since so far I have only asked participants about other people, this is the time to ask them to share a personal information, and only AFTER they have already participated. I have quit surveys at the very beginning because I did not feel safe with what they were asking about my personal life and contact information.
I received responses from 17 people. Together, nine of them knew 113 people who had worked using a fake social security number; 47 others who had bought a sham spouse, of which 15 were women.
Here are some of the most interesting responses:
In contrast with Hearken, in which people were concerned about being associated with a journalist covering green-card marriage, in Groundsource participants willingly identified themselves by their full names. Both persons who did so had personal stories of immigration fraud and were not afraid to share it, which makes me think this service established a higher level of trust with participants.
Text services are definitely I good way to reach out to the Latino immigrant community in the U.S. Latinos use WhatsApp to keep in touch with their own community here. The same is true for Facebook closed groups, but since they expose connections in common, family members and photos, people may feel safer contacting me through a phone number, where they can share as little as a WhatsApp nickname.
Text surveys are very helpful in collecting answers from outside your known community and groups. Call-outs “travel” easily on WhatsApp groups and social media’s direct messages, too. If people have fun and feel useful while answering the survey through text messages, they will forward them to friends they think will also have fun. After all, the internet is all about sharing, whether a meme, a screenshot of a chat or the link to a story.
And don’t we just love the feeling of connecting positively with someone else?
Bottom line: if you are dealing with any marginalized community, whether or not its members are committing a crime, we journalists must absolutely use public-powered tools to start building a relationship of trust with them. They may be hiding in the dark, dodging anyone they think might uncover them. But they do have a phone they are used to trusting. If you can get to that magic box, social journalism miracles may unfold.
Learn more about Groundsource.
