Fake Cubans hoping for fast track to citizenship now under scrutiny
By Kim Segal and Sara Ganim, CNN
updated 9:30 PM EDT, Fri August 2, 2013
Miami (CNN) -- All Luis had to do was hand a Cuban birth certificate to immigration officials and he was on his way to becoming a U.S. citizen.
"I started to receive my work permission, I went to the DMV, got my driver's license, I get my Social Security and that was it," he said.
Those are the privileges afforded to Cubans who flee the Castro regime and make it to the United States to seek asylum.
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Anatomy of a fraud
The scam starts with the purchase of a Cuban birth certificate for between $10,000 and $20,000, she said.
Birth certificates are not yet computerized in Cuba -- they're torn from a book and the information is filled out by hand before being logged into a register. "The documents that they are presenting in some cases are actual Cuban birth certificates which are smuggled into the country blank, and then filled in with fictitious information here," Erichs said.
And while the documents are easily falsified, the benefits they can bring are real.
"There's little doubt that Cubans are treated better than any other group," said Cheryl Little, executive director of Americans for Immigrant Justice. "And that's been the case for decades."
Since the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, Cubans automatically gain refugee status upon arriving in the country and are put on a fast track to naturalization. The minute Cubans set foot on U.S. soil they don't need to worry about being deported, unlike migrants or even asylum-seekers from other countries. They receive a green card after being in the United States for a year and a day -- a much shorter time than faced by other legal immigrants.
More:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/02/us/cuba-immigration-fraud/
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