「经济学人」U bet

Police say this is to get access to visas for victims of crime

From the security-camera footage last July, it looks terrifying. Masked men burst into a liquor store in Bucktown, a wealthy neighbourhood in Chicago, pointing guns. Customers stick their hands up, as one gunman waves his weapon furiously. Suddenly, the employee behind the counter disappears, as shards of glass or liquid fill the screen. He has been shot in the stomach. The robbers flee in a stolen Kia car. “They said, give us all of the money,” said Diptesh Patel, the business’s owner, in an interview to local TV news.

So far, so normal. Liquor-store robberies are hardly rare in America. Yet according to an indictment unsealed in federal court in Chicago on May 17th, this one was staged: some of the victims (though not the man shot) had paid to get robbed. The robbery was one of 16 that prosecutors allege were organised by the defendants, mostly in the Chicago area, but also in Tennessee and Louisiana. According to the indictment, they were conducted “so that the purported victims of the robberies could apply for u-visas”. Six people, four of them Indian nationals, have been charged with conspiracy to commit visa fraud.

The u-visa was created in 2000 by Congress as part of a broader act intended to crack down on human trafficking. It is available to victims of certain serious crimes, and gives the recipient and their immediate family the right to live in America for four years, with a path to a green card. The idea is to make sure that victims without legal status in America co-operate with the authorities.

Police in Houston say that a robbery-murder in January may have been part of a botched attempt to procure a u-visa. Late last year two suspects were charged in federal court in Massachusetts with conducting a string of fake robberies in four states. In 2022 government auditors reported that safeguards against fraud with the u-visa were weak.

Yet it is not easy even for legitimate victims to get a u-visa, says Kathleen Bush-Joseph, of the Migration Policy Institute, a think-tank. To apply, you need a police officer to certify you were a victim of a crime. In 2022 Injustice Watch, an ngo, criticised the Chicago Police Department for refusing about half of applicants. And being certified is only the start. Congress sets a cap of 10,000 visas per year; the backlog of pending applications has reached 354,000. Joining the queue does give applicants the right to work. But it is an almost five-year wait just to do that.

Arranging a fake robbery for a semi-legal status in half a decade seems quite a risk to take. But many would-be immigrants are desperate. Some 10m people in America have no path to legal status. “People will take the few avenues that they have,” notes Ms Bush-Joseph.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “U bet”(May 23rd 2024)

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