The Globe obtained a redacted version with several pages missing. The internal investigation was completed in August, but it has not been made public. The Brooklyn case helped prompt Homeland Security, which had inherited the religious worker visa program from the old Immigration and Naturalization Services, to conduct an audit. The man had declared himself to be an imam and the basement of his store to be a mosque. In September 2004, a Pakistani man living in Brooklyn, N.Y., was convicted of visa fraud for helping more than 200 illegal immigrants falsely obtain religious worker visas. Such concerns have grown since the terrorist attacks of Sept. In 1999, for example, the General Accounting Office found that many applicants for temporary religious worker visas were unqualified for the positions they were coming to fill. The program has long been suspected of being susceptible to fraud. In fiscal year 2006, the top five countries of origin for religious worker visa recipients were India, Mexico, South Korea, Brazil and Colombia. The State Department said that statistics breaking down recipients by faith are not available, but the majority do not come from predominantly Muslim countries. The program dates to 1990, and has been used primarily by the Catholic Church. The Homeland Security study looked only at petitions for green cards, but the report noted that the three-year visa program faces identical fraud risks. There are two types: temporary three-year visas, and "green cards" that allow foreigners to become permanent residents. government issues several thousand religious worker visas each year. The application also must provide evidence that the sponsor is a bona fide religious organization that qualifies for nonprofit tax status. An applicant must include letters from a sponsor attesting that he or she has been a member of its denomination for at least two years, that the applicant will fill a specific religious position and is qualified for the job. The sponsoring group or the foreigner may file the application. Under the program, churches, synagogues and mosques can ask the gove rnment to grant visas to foreigners to fill vacant positions.
In another case, investigators found that an Egyptian man working for a religious group in the United States had filed "at least 82 petitions with many fraud indicators" in an attempt to obtain visas for dozens of alleged religious workers. In addition, the investigators found that an address listed on the form "has been used by an individual suspected of membership with a terrorist organization." The report does not say whether the address was in Pakistan or the United States. Homeland Security auditors who reviewed an application for a 33-year-old Pakistani man, for example, could not locate the alleged religious group listed on the petition as his sponsor, and when investigators went to the group's address they found an apartment complex. A report on the investigation, obtained by the Globe, said that instances of fraud were particularly high among applicants from predominantly Muslim countries, and the report raised concerns about potential terrorism risks. More than a third of the visas examined by investigators were based on fraudulent information. The probe found numerous instances in which groups in the United States falsely claimed to be churches, and visa applicants lied about their religious vocations to get into the country. We include here the entire article.)Ī special visa program that allows churches to bring thousands of foreign religious workers into the country each year is riddled with fraud, an investigation by the Department of Homeland Security has found. It is useful information in understanding the present proposed rule changes for this visa, which is used by many Hindu temples to bring priests and temple artisans to America. WASHINGTON, D.C., May 29, 2007: (HPI note: This article from July 15, 2006, is the most complete report we've seen on the fraud investigation of the religious worker visa program. Understanding the Fraud Investigation Behind the R-1 Visa Changes