Preying on Vulnerable Newcomers

Sung Joo Kim had lived in California barely a year when he caught the ad in the Korea Times touting the medical prowess of Jae Kyo Ha, M.D., PhD.

The day Kim walked into Ha’s clinic in Torrance, he was greeted by a bespectacled, balding man garbed in a blue surgical gown, a stethoscope hanging from his pocket. As Kim tells it, he showed Ha his quarter-size abscess. “Come in tomorrow and bring $1,000,” he said Ha instructed him in Korean.

The operation took 30 minutes. But eventually, Kim said, it left him disabled, jobless and bereft of $150,000 of family savings. Kim later learned that Ha, who has since vanished, had no medical license.

“How could this happen in America?” Kim asks, his skin still discolored from mercury that Ha used to burn infected tissue.

It is a question that haunts many immigrants these days. Newcomers have settled in California in record numbers over the last decade, expecting to find a land of opportunity--and law and order. Instead, many of them are getting tricked, cheated and swindled.

From bogus doctors to unscrupulous notaries to agents who sell phony travel packages or worthless land, the exploitation of immigrants--legal as well as undocumented--has reached unprecedented proportions in California, according to many people who monitor the situation.

“On a massive scale, people are taking advantage of others, and no one seems to care because the victims are immigrants,” said Luke Williams, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

Government agencies don’t record fraud or other reported crimes by ethnicity. But more than 200 interviews and an array of government statistics and dozens of recent, largely unpublicized cases culled from courts, police stations, consumer agencies and community service groups, suggest the problem is not only pervasive but growing.

“What we’ve seen is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Bill McDonald, enforcement chief at the state Department of Corporations, which is launching its first probe into immigrant-affinity scams--which involve people targeting others of the same background, a big problem in ethnic communities. “When we push aside the veil, we’re going to find that this is a huge problem.”

The exploitation, mostly of Latinos and Asians, has prompted comparisons to the harsh lot of European immigrants earlier this century. It creates enormous financial and social costs and impedes assimilation, but its significance has been masked by the nation’s raging debate over large-scale immigration, particularly of the undocumented.

In fact, many believe that the fierce public backlash and government crackdown on immigrants have made new arrivals even more insular and vulnerable to those who prey on their naivete and fears.

Immigrants, of course, are not the only ones ensnared by scams, especially in Southern California, a place long viewed as a hub of white-collar fraud. But as ethnic communities have burgeoned in size and wealth, immigrants have emerged as prime targets.

“It’s outrageous,” said Harold W. Ezell, former western director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service during the Ronald Reagan administration and now a member of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform.

“If somebody has lost everything they brought to this country, where can they go but to their relatives, some charitable organization or the government?”

How, he asks, can immigrants become good citizens if they lose faith and confidence in America and its institutions?

“We set the trust back for years.”

Stories of Exploitation

Exploitation can begin in the homeland, where immigrants can be deceived by recruiters promising jobs that never materialize. Once here, they face problems in employment, in housing, in stores and on the streets.

Listen to some of their stories:

* More than 100 Latino immigrants in Santa Ana answered an ad offering jobs starting at $6 an hour. Once there, the business charged them $40 to apply and then told them they needed English training--for $200 more. Many paid, but no one found work. The agency vanished last summer.

* Sun Light Maintenance had contracts to clean buildings. But the Los Angeles firm informally subcontracted the work to new arrivals like Pyung Gyung Goo of Koreatown. Goo paid Sun Light $3,125, and Sun Light agreed to pay Goo $1,125 a month to maintain one building. But after a few months, Sun Light’s payment stopped. Records show Goo won a $5,000 judgment in Small Claims Court, but he never got his money. Sun Light filed for bankruptcy last fall.

* “What a great fiesta. And to think that there was a time when we couldn’t get any credit.” So began one of the many radio ads in Spanish last year that attracted hundreds of customers to Great Credit Co. of Westlake Village. In a civil suit, state attorneys allege that Great Credit fraudulently promised to “clean up” people’s negative credit record without regard to its accuracy. The fee: about $700. Great Credit went out of business last spring. The suit is pending.

* Ty Nguyen, a refugee from Vietnam living in Garden Grove, was approached by a compatriot peddling a white and blue decal with a police star on it. “If the police stops you and sees this sticker, he’ll let you go,” the man confided, asking $50 apiece. Nguyen bought two for a “discount” price of $80.

Thien Cao, a veteran police officer in Orange County’s Little Saigon area who recounted this last episode, sees no easy solutions.

Working out of a storefront office behind a Chinese theater, Cao is one of four bilingual Asian officers in a police force of 165 in Garden Grove, a city where more than 20% of the residents are Asians, the vast majority immigrants.

But even additional resources may not be enough, Cao said, because immigrant victims seldom report such abuses to authorities. Language barriers, cultural traditions, lack of information and distrust of government--the same factors that make immigrants vulnerable--also contribute to their silence.

“Do you know what a perfect crime is?” Cao asks. “It is a crime that is not reported.”

Surge in Newcomers Adds to Abuses

At the root of it all is a dramatic surge in immigration, legal and undocumented, that has pushed the foreign-born share of California’s population to 26%--the highest since the late 1800s and almost triple the nationwide rate.

Amid sweeping changes in immigration policy and economics, nearly 5 million immigrants have settled in California since 1980, according to March 1996 data from the Census Bureau, the latest available.

As a result, more than a third of the nation’s 24 million immigrants live in California, even though the state makes up one-eighth of the U.S. population.

Immigration nationally has slowed since peaking in 1991, but California continues to receive a disproportionately large share of newcomers, including tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants every year.

This massive flow of newcomers is matched only by the last great wave of immigration, between 1901 and 1920, when 14.5 million Europeans flocked to America, 30% settling in New York.

The turn-of-the-century immigrants also were besieged by many of the same forms of exploitation.

But unlike today, the subject drew immense concern and discussion. After a series of hearings in 1923, the New York state legislature approved a number of measures to protect newcomers.

The absence of such public debate today, some scholars say, suggests that the exploitation of immigrants is not nearly as bad. Unlike the prior immigrants, they say, today’s newcomers are better educated and have more protections from government, social service organizations and family networks.

But others question the validity of those assumptions, saying what’s really different is the dramatic influx of undocumented immigrants--and the political and economic buttons they push.

On one side, many believe that illegal immigrants bring the problems on themselves and should not be protected by government. Others see the intense focus on the undocumented as an excuse to ignore the economic and social complications raised by so many newcomers from Mexico and Asia--here legally and illegally.

“This notion of exploitation has been turned on its head,” said Edna Bonacich, a sociology professor at UC Riverside who has written extensively about California’s newcomers. “The political debate is that immigrants are exploiting California.”

Bernardino Alvarado, 48, crossed the border in late 1993 on his second attempt.

The day after he arrived in Los Angeles County, he arose early and walked to a street corner where dozens of other day laborers had gathered. Alvarado earned $10 for two hours of work removing floor tile. “I was happy,” he recalled, saying that was almost three days wages in his village in Guanajuato, Mexico.

Then on one April morning in 1994, Alvarado jumped into a yellow Chevy pickup, following the employer to the San Fernando Valley. And for most of the next six months, he blasted concrete and rebuilt fences and block walls smashed by the Northridge earthquake. Alvarado said the contractor, Andres Martinez of El Monte, agreed to pay him $50 a day, but claims that the employer missed numerous payments and still owes him $2,300 for 45 days of work.

When Alvarado took his complaint to the Small Claims Court with the help of a labor activist, Martinez offered to pay him before going through with the proceeding. So Alvarado dropped the claim, but he says he still hasn’t gotten all his money.

When contacted by The Times, Martinez refused to comment, except to say: “This is a bunch of lies.”

Alvarado, who lives in a 6-by-10-foot utility closet that he rents for $135 a month, never went to school. He is now learning to read and write in Spanish. “I don’t think they will exploit me from now,” he said.

What makes undocumented immigrants particularly susceptible to exploitation is their fears of being detected. So even though they can legally file claims in Small Claims Court, among other places, many do not.

“Certainly it makes them more vulnerable,” said Georges Vernez, director of Rand’s center for research on immigration policy. “There is always the threat of being deported.”

Lack of Education, Job Skills

Some of the conditions that make undocumented immigrants vulnerable afflict legions of legal immigrants as well.

More than before, newcomers are more likely to have low job skill and education levels, and to be less proficient in English. Census Bureau data shows that:

* About one-third of the foreign-born population in California is not proficient in English. In 1920, about 20% of immigrants in New York said they could not speak English.

* Immigrants in California saturate low-paying occupations, and are twice as likely to be food service workers and four times more likely to be construction laborers than non-immigrants, according to 1996 data. More than 70% of the farm work is filled by immigrants, and foreign-born workers occupy 50% of the factory assembly jobs and 53% of janitorial work.

* In California, immigrants 25 and older are four times more likely not to have a high school degree than U.S.-born residents. And despite perceptions to the contrary, a sizable share of Asian immigrants 25 and older are poorly educated. In 1996, 15% of Asian immigrants had not gone beyond the eighth grade, compared to 2.5% of non-immigrants.

Among the most vulnerable are the hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asian refugees in California, whose economic situation and resettlement trauma compound the alienation, powerlessness and loneliness felt by many immigrants.

In the tight-knit Laotian community in south Richmond, in the Bay Area, Joe Phomvilay, 38, bitterly recalls how he and seven others were fleeced by a travel agent, a countryman who went by the name “Sam.”

Phomvilay said he and the others, mostly elderly newcomers from Laos, had each turned over $1,250 to Sam, who agreed to give them airline tickets and visas. It was supposed to be their first return trip to their native land, to greet relatives, to visit family shrines. But on that February afternoon, when Phomvilay and the other travelers went to San Francisco International Airport, suitcases in hand, Sam never showed up.

“I trusted him,” said Phomvilay, who as the travel group’s leader was blamed by other victims. “He’s Laotian. It’s easy to talk to him. This guy said he was an expert in travel agency. He knows how to get into Laos. He has a business card, an office. It seemed like it was OK.”

Taking Advantage of Cultural Ties

Culture also is used as a weapon. Door-to-door salespeople, for example, know that many in the Vietnamese community will at least open the door because it’s considered rude not to speak to people face to face.

In Koreatown, schemes such as the subcontracting of janitorial work are successful because “being a businessman is equated to be being successful in Korea,” said Danny Park, case manager at the Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates of Southern California, which has handled scores of complaints of janitorial subcontracting fraud.

But more than anything else, experts agree, immigrants are more likely to be unaware of how American society and particularly the marketplace work. In many cases, those who are defrauded come from small towns and villages.

“Our community is very gullible,” said Alma Buis, a Fullerton police officer who works closely with the city’s growing Latino immigrant population.

The idea of credit is foreign to many immigrants. This can lead to honest misunderstandings or, at worst, outright deception.

Car leasing has resulted in a burgeoning number of complaints from Spanish-speaking consumers.

Cecilio Ontiveros, a 53-year-old machine operator who lives in Norwalk, is a permanent resident who is not proficient in English. He said he recently gave a Cerritos car dealer his 1993 Ford van as a down payment on a new one. Ontiveros made the deal in Spanish, agreeing to pay $395 a month for three years, then drove away in his new van.

Ontiveros thought he had bought the vehicle. But his 23-year-old son, Luis, who is fluent in English, read the contract (which was in English) and told his father it was a lease. The elder Ontiveros exploded. “I was tricked,” he said.

In March, Ontiveros took his complaint to the Los Angeles County Consumer Affairs Department. Curtis Floyd, sales manager at Cerritos Lincoln-Mercury, said it was a misunderstanding. After being contacted by the agency, he subsequently offered to change Ontiveros’ lease into a purchase. But Ontiveros did not accept that, saying that it was too expensive.

Floyd acknowledged that Ontiveros’ lease agreement was in English, although state law requires auto dealers to provide contracts in Spanish if the deal was conducted in that language.

Unwillingness to File Complaints

The paucity of complaints by immigrants can be seen in these statistics from the state Department of Consumer Affairs, one of the few agencies that has a service in which reports can be made in about two dozen languages.

From August 1995 to July 1996, foreign language complaints statewide totaled 592--less than .01% of the total.

“Unfortunately, immigrants are among the groups least likely to complain,” said Susan Henrichsen, a deputy attorney general in San Diego.

Some immigrants, particularly the undocumented, hold back because they do not want to draw attention to themselves or they see their problems as shameful. Many others simply do not know where to report such crimes or believe that even if they did, authorities would not do much for them.

And cultural practices and experiences in their homeland play a role.

Henry Der, a Chinese American civil rights activist and now deputy superintendent in the state Department of Education, says many Asians come from countries that do not grant their citizens freedom of speech, much less the right to contest corporate practices.

“To challenge the government in those countries is to places one’s well-being in peril,” Der said in a May letter to the California Public Utilities on the issue of “slamming,” the unauthorized switching of long-distance service by telemarketers, whose prime targets have been immigrants.

Said Pablo Alvarado, an activist with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles who has worked with hundreds of Latino day laborers in the Southland: “We come from repressive and oppressive backgrounds, and no one trusts authorities. The general idea we have is that the United States is the most democratic society and that illegal and illicit behavior doesn’t take place here.”

Lack of Outreach by Government

But if immigrants are reluctant to complain or report fraud, consumer advocates say, it is largely because government agencies have not done outreach and do not have enough bilingual, bicultural investigators to help them.

The state receives dozens of complaints monthly about notaries public who misrepresent themselves, particularly to Latinos. But the state has just one investigator--who doesn’t speak Spanish and is based in Sacramento.

State budget cuts during the recession have weakened many other agencies. The Labor Commissioner’s office, where workers can take wage disputes, has closed several offices in the Southland.

“You have a lot of poor immigrant people [who file claims], then when they find out they have to attend a conference in Van Nuys or Long Beach, they just drop the complaint,” said Jose Millan, an assistant labor commissioner who recently quit after 10 years.

Other agencies, including the state medical board, California Department of Corporations and the state Justice Department, acknowledge that they have few investigators and little foreign language capability. The Orange County district attorney’s consumer fraud unit has one person.

Kathy Li, associate director of Consumer Action, a consumer rights group in Francisco, believes that the exploitation is getting worse because perpetrators know that there are fewer protections for immigrants.

“It’s very clear that efforts such as bilingual consumer education [are] diminishing because of funding,” said Li. “And that’s because of this whole anti-immigrant atmosphere.”

Whether that’s true or not, there is increasing political pressure to limit public benefits and services to immigrants, particularly the undocumented.

Ernesto Chavez, a bilingual investigator at the California Medical Board, wonders where these people will go if they are denied basic medical care. Some, he fears, will turn to folks like Jose Izquierdo.

Based on an anonymous tip, Chavez went undercover last summer as a patient in Izquierdo’s El Monte house, where the 60-year-old man was practicing medicine and dispensing prescription drugs obtained from Tijuana. Officers confiscated $1,600 in cash stashed in a closet, apparently obtained from patients, and noticed hypodermic needles, medical instruments and a doctor’s smock, according to the El Monte Police crime report.

Izquierdo pleaded guilty last fall to one count of practicing medicine without a license, a misdemeanor. He was fined $405 and put on three years’ probation.

Izquierdo refused to be interviewed. “How is this going to help me?” he said recently in clear English, standing behind two dogs and a fence in a deep, bushy yard leading to his bungalow.

Chavez said he doesn’t know whether any people suffered after being treated by Izquierdo. But he noted that such cases in the immigrant communities “happen all the time.”

Short-Lived Paradise for Kim Family

Sung Joo Kim, 43, his wife and young son emigrated from Korea in the summer of 1993, invited by an older brother who had immigrated earlier to California. Both are college graduates; he worked as a social worker, she as a pharmacist in their home city of Tae Gu.

With their life savings, the Kims bought a comfortable house in Del Mar Heights. Kim started an import-export business, and the family led an idyllic life.

But paradise lasted just one year. According to a civil lawsuit that Kim has filed against Ha, in August 1994 Ha made the first incision on the abscess in Kim’s buttocks. After the surgery, Kim said, Ha gave him some antibiotics and Chinese herbal syrup, and guaranteed full recovery within two months.

But two weeks later, Kim said he began bleeding profusely. Over the next 10 months, Kim went to Ha frequently. Observing Korean customs, Kim did not question Ha, whom he called “teacher.”

After one treatment in March, Kim said he vomited, then passed out, his temperature soaring to 107 degrees.

By the time Kim went to see a new doctor, in June 1995, he was disabled, he said. A month later, Kim confronted Ha directly. “Do you have a medical license?” Kim asked. “No,” he said Ha responded.

The California Medical Board has moved to revoke Ha’s acupuncture license, which Ha obtained in 1987, records show. And the district attorney’s office in Torrance has filed a criminal complaint and issued an arrest warrant against Ha for practicing medicine without a license.

But Ha and his family have disappeared.

In July, curiosity moved Kim to drive by Ha’s house in Torrance. Kim found that it was empty and had been repossessed by the bank. The house was sold in September.

Unable to sit, drive or walk for very long, Kim spends most of his day in bed in the family’s two-bedroom apartment in Corona del Mar. The Kims had to sell their house to pay medical bills.

“You know what my dream is?” he asks. “I want to get a job. I have to stay strong. I don’t want to discourage my son.”

On some sleepless nights, when his wife and 9-year-old boy are in bed, Kim cries. “Even in Korea, I cannot even imagine such a thing happening,” he said. “I thought United States would be more strict.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Second Great Wave

Not since the turn of the century have so many new immigrants arrived in America. But their main destination has shifted from New York to California, reflecting the change in the countries of origin, from Europe to Asia and Latin America.

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California New York 1980-96 1901-1920 New arrivals to U.S. 14.4 million 14.5 million Number settling in New York -- 4.4 million Number settling in California 4.8 million -- % of all immigrants 33% 30%

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****

Top Countries of Origin

1980-96

1. Mexico

2. Philippines

3. Vietnam

4. El Salvador

5. China

6. Korea

****

1901-1920

1. Italy

2. Austria/Hungary

3. Russia

4. Great Britain

5. Ireland

6. Germany

****

California Comparison

U.S.-born Californians on average have smaller households, more income and are better educated. A 1996 comparison:

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U.S.-born Foreign-born Household size 1-2 42% 22% 3-4 42% 37% 5 or more 16% 41% Household income Less than $10,000 8% 10% $10,000-$19,999 13% 21% $20,000-$34,999 17% 22% $35,000-$49,999 16% 17% $50,000 or more 46% 30% Education (25 or older) Less than high school grad 10% 42% High school grad/some college 51% 31% Associate degree 10% 6% Bachelor’s degree 20% 15% Graduate or professional degree 9% 6%

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Sources: U.S. Census Bureau; Bureau of Labor Statistics; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Ellis Island Immigration Museum

Researched by JANICE L. JONES and DON LEE / Los Angeles Times