They came in a huddled mass, tired, poor and yearning to breathe free. Then, they saw the ads.
"You are disabled, mental disabled, having serious sickness or being wounded, you may be eligible," proclaimed one offer in a Cambodian newspaper in Santa Ana, Calif.
"Free counseling," said another in Beverly Hills. "Client will only pay after receiving money."
And again in San Jose: "We are professionals on SSI -- with 85% successfulness!"
Through such ads, thousands of immigrants have stepped onto U.S. soil in recent years and found their way to hucksters, con men and entrepreneuring social workers who steered them onto a federal welfare program for the disabled called Supplemental Security Income. Without working so much as a day, the new arrivals begin collecting $458 a month.
In just five years, their numbers on the SSI rolls have doubled to more than 700,000 -- making them the second-fastest growing group in a Social Security program originally intended for poor Americans too old or disabled to support themselves.
In 1994 alone, their monthly payments absorbed almost $4 billion in taxes -- enough to buy a four-year education at Harvard University for every graduating high school senior in the Maryland public school system.
And more are on their way from such places as Mexico, Vietnam and Russia as an immigration boom almost unprecedented in U.S. history continues.
Now, the new Republican majority in Congress is gunning for them. Spurred by the mounting voter outrage that led California to cut off services to illegal aliens in November, the GOP is expected to call later this week for deep cuts in disability aid to noncitizens.
"It's time for them to live up to the commitments they made when they came to this country," said Sen. Rick Santorum of Pittsburgh, a former Republican representative who parlayed promises to purge the foreigners into a successful Senate campaign. "We cannot allow ourselves to become the dumping ground for the world's problems."
But records make clear that Congress is largely responsible for the problem. It triggered the surge by inviting thousands of mentally ill refugees into the United States and allowing them onto SSI just as it was passing the most generous mental disability rules in history.
As a result, more than 1 million "mentally disabled" people came onto the rolls. And mental problems became the No. 1 claim of those seeking aid -- citizens and noncitizens alike.
Records show that immigrants came onto the rolls for mental disabilities at a faster rate than any other group except children, demonstrating the combined effects of open-handed immigration policies and relaxed rules on mental disability.
Today, Social Security pays out more than $25 billion to 6.3 million disabled and elderly people. One out of every eight is a legal alien or refugee. Of the disabled, one out of every three is getting checks for a psychological problem.
These two facts are closely related. Behind them is the story of a 24-year immigrant boom that caught Social Security unaware, the rise of America's disability culture and how they were both promoted by Congress. And it might not have been told at all if not for a man named Simardy McNeil Chan.
A 33-year-old San Diego County social worker, he ran a cottage industry from the front seat of his gray BMW 318i sedan helping Southeast Asian refugees scam money from Social Security.
For a fee of $2,700, he led able-bodied aliens into a federal office building in San Diego, took them before Social Security caseworkers and fabricated harrowing tales of wartime suffering that he claimed left his clients too traumatized to hold a job.
He had been able to do this for seven years, he boasted to a group of potential clients last year, because few of the agency's caseworkers could speak foreign languages well enough to question immigrants directly.
"Not to worry," he assured them. "They are Americans. We are Cambodians."
Posing as a translator, Chan did all the talking. He then steered his clients to psychologists who -- citing the mental disability rules passed by Congress -- confirmed that they were mentally ill and couldn't work. Social Security would then begin mailing them monthly payments.
In this manner, Chan once boasted, he had no trouble getting checks for 2,000 of his countrymen, a population that would cost U.S. taxpayers more than $10 million a year.
He had no way of knowing that three of his customers were undercover informants for the California attorney general's office that his sales pitch was being recorded by hidden microphones.
Caught red-handed, Chan was convicted last year of lying to caseworkers to get his clients government aid.
In exchange for a lenient sentence, he agreed to help state agents "sting" doctors, druggists and psychologists running "disability mills" for Southeast Asian refugees in Southern California. One Vietnamese doctor and another Cambodian translator have been indicted so far.
"They are big men from the SSI -- rich men," said Sombath Uon, a 44-year-old Cambodian who helped bring down McNeil Chan. "You see them in their big houses with their new cars. And the people are waiting in line outside their door to get the SSI like beggars. They are teaching the people to lie, to steal from the government.
"They are like godfathers."
Powerful figures
From San Diego to Seattle, the middle men have become powerful figures, he said, commanding respect once reserved for village elders.
Some are trained and bonded translators who help refugees with everything from drivers' licenses to mortgage settlements. But others are fly-by-night hustlers who herd the sick, the poor and the gullible through Social Security's English-speaking bureaucracy, then take a cut of the check and disappear.
They advertise in California's Vietnamese newspapers and on Cambodian radio talk shows. They rent office space in places such as Long Beach, where 100,000 refugees have given the city what is said to be the largest Cambodian population outside Cambodia. They do business in Thai, Laotian, Filipino and Japanese.
Alerted by the California attorney general's office to the fraud and unabashed marketing of the troubled aid program, Congress and President Clinton approved a raft of paper changes to the SSI law last summer.
What they did not do is fix long-standing flaws in the program that have allowed untold millions of dollars in fraud and waste to flourish for more than two decades.
They did not give Social Security money to hire or train more
bilingual caseworkers. Rather, Mr. Clinton is cutting the work force at a time when only 14 percent of the agency's 30,000 caseworkers speak anything but English and less than 1 percent speak the Asian or Eastern European languages involved in most of the known fraud.
Congress did not address the fact that federal law enforcement agencies have turned a blind eye to the fraud, leaving 300 Social Security field investigators on their own. It is the equivalent of asking one Baltimore Police Department district station to cover the entire state of Maryland.
And Congress did not acknowledge that it is largely responsible for the problem it is now complaining about.
In the grip of the Cold War, the nation's lawmakers began as early as 1965 to loosen immigration rules for refugees fleeing Communist countries, giving automatic residency to many and triggering a sharp rise in immigration.
A decade later, they created SSI -- telling taxpayers that the program was for elderly and disabled Americans who could not help themselves.
But low-level legislative aides who wrote the program's rules inserted a sentence that wiped out long-standing residency requirements that once kept immigrants from getting government aid for years. And it meant that refugees were eligible the moment they stepped off the boat.
Then, beginning in 1984, Congress approved new mental disability rules that made it easier for the mentally ill to get on SSI -- just as a tide of mentally stressed refugees was streaming through America's golden door.
The fall of South Vietnam, the civil war in Cambodia, the exodus from Fidel Castro's Cuba, the U.S.-backed contra war in Nicaragua, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of Haiti and other calamities brought more than 15 million legal aliens into the United States.
It was 25 percent of the total U.S. immigration since 1820, packed into little more than two decades. And almost half came from the Asian and former Communist bloc countries of Eastern Europe that now account for most reports of translator fraud.
"We're dealing with an alien community isolated by language and cultural barriers that has been traumatized by unbelievably brutal wars and incredible poverty," said Chris Rodriguez of the California attorney general's office. "And we have a set of mental disability rules that practically any of them can pass, even though they may be working and supporting their families."
The new immigrants arrived to find a Social Security Administration that had failed to train its work force in foreign languages.
"It's a problem we weren't even aware of until the last few years," said Lenore Carlson, who oversees the agency's 1,300 field offices.
Few facts, big problems
Social Security never kept a comprehensive record of which offices were being hardest hit, she said, and never compiled enough data on immigrants to get a true picture of the boom. Likewise, no congressional audit of disabled aliens has ever been done.
Meanwhile, caseworkers were drowning -- caught between time-consuming applications from aliens and demands from supervisors to keep the cases moving in the face of a shrinking work force.
"We get all the runaways, homeless and vagabonds from four states," said Jeff Saul, a Seattle caseworker. "They're babbling at you in four dialects of Chinese, 13 Asian tongues, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian and Filipino. We're using translators and sign language to prepare their applications.
"And God help you if you make a mistake or your productivity slips. Friend, you don't know what frustration is until you've spent a day in an SSA field office."
That's not the way Social Security Commissioner Shirley S. Chater tells it.
"I recently returned from a trip out West and was greatly heartened to see our people all pulling together in a spirit of cooperation to get a handle on this problem," she said in a recent interview. "And I believe we are. There's an optimism and positiveness that is inspiring."
Of the 913 Social Security field workers in the Seattle region, only 26 speak Asian or Eastern European languages, leaving them heavily dependent on free-lance translators. And none speak Cambodian.
Given these circumstances, caseworkers say, events that unfolded there last year should come as no surprise.
After nearly four years of gathering leads on a suspected translator fraud ring, the state Office of Special Investigations drew the interest of the U.S. attorney's office in Seattle, which launched the only federal investigation to date into immigrant fraud.
FBI agents tracing the clients of one translator uncovered 50 unqualified applicants who would have drawn almost $17 million in benefits in their lifetimes had they not been caught, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Schroeder.
"If that isn't enough to drive you crazy, consider the fact that we have taken down three of these guys so far," Mr. Schroeder said. "And between the three of them, we're talking about potential losses in excess of $200 million to U.S. taxpayers."
Typical was the case of a 63-year-old Vietnamese translator named Thah Huyen "Jimmy" Vo.
American dream
Jimmy Vo came to the United States in 1975 after the fall of Saigon, after fording the Mekong River into Thailand with his wife and eight children, after living for months in squalid refugee camps.
Landing in Tacoma, the family began pursuing the American dream as thousands of immigrants before them had done: the hard way. They picked fruit and vegetables in the fields east of the city by day, attended school at night and saved their money.
Within a year, Jimmy Vo bought his first home off Yakima Street -- "Little Vietnam" -- Tacoma's refugee quarter. By 1980, he had his U.S. citizenship and a master's degree in social work from the University of Washington.
Soon, he opened his own business, Refugee Professional Services. Increasing respectability followed. He became a volunteer counselor for abused children and campaigned on behalf of a Little Vietnam community center.
Then, Jimmy Vo's American success story came unraveled.
"We paid him $500 to assist us," a Cambodian named Sophan No told Tacoma police. "Jimmy Vo helped my wife and I to lie to the doctors and to the government people in order to qualify for SSI."
"I pretended to the doctors to be very stupid, and this was a lie because I am very smart," said another immigrant, Savoeun David Sam. "I pretended to the doctors that I could not work, and this was a lie because I was able to work very well."
Between them, the two Cambodians qualified for $32,000 in SSI and other government benefits after bluffing their way through mental examinations with Jimmy Vo's help, court records show. In exchange for their cooperation and a promise to pay the money back, they drew a few weeks in jail. Jimmy Vo got five years in federal prison.
To investigators working the case, Vo demonstrated just how easy it is for almost anyone to exploit Social Security's mental disability rules with the right coaching or a sympathetic doctor. And there are signs that his is not an isolated case.
Unequal equation
Today, there are about 1,500 people on SSI living in and around the compact Little Vietnam neighborhood that covers a few square blocks near Tacoma's Lincoln Park. On their behalf, Social Security pumps about $3 million every year into the tiny community of neat clapboard homes and apartment buildings.
Social Security officials say most refugees on SSI -- two out three -- are simply too old to work. But Tacoma turns that equation on its ear. Of the 1,500 recipients in Little Vietnam, records show, only 200 are elderly.
Still, Ms. Chater said she is confident that fraud among refugees is not widespread.
"We don't want the American people to think this whole program is rife with fraud and start petitioning their Congress members to kill it," she said. "The fraud we're talking about represents a tiny fraction of cases."
Mr. Schroeder, the Seattle prosecutor, is not so sure.
"We keep hearing over and over again that we're making a mountain out of molehill," he said. "But the fraction we've been able to prove amounts to millions of federal taxpayers' dollars. And I stress the words 'able to prove.' The fact is, nobody has dug very deeply into this problem."
That's because Social Security's police force -- the 300 agents in the Health and Human Services Inspector General's Office -- are so busy investigating scams in other federal programs that they barely have time for anything else.
And federal prosecutors are too busy handling drug cases in most jurisdictions to be of much help. Even when local investigators manage to crack an SSI fraud case, they usually have trouble finding a U.S. attorney's office willing to take it to court.
"If you look at individual cases of SSI fraud, you're not generally looking at large dollar losses," said Linda Summers, a senior Inspector General's investigator in the Los Angeles regional office. "And that's what we need to justify spending $300,000 on a full-blown investigation. We're not exactly overstaffed either."
Her office's 13 agents cover a 75,000-square-mile swath of two states that stretches from Los Angeles to Las Vegas -- an area that contains no less than 400,000 SSI recipients, zip code records show. To perform a cursory review of that many case files would take each of her agents nine years.
"Finding the fraud would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack," Agent Summers said.
And even when agents prove fraud by a translator they cannot automatically kick his clients off the rolls. Under rules set up by Congress in 1984, they must also prove that the recipient is, in fact, not disabled.
"We're investigators, not psychologists," she said. "How are we supposed to determine whether somebody has a disabling mental condition when four psychologists will examine the same guy and give you four different opinions?
"The bottom line is that once somebody qualifies for benefits, especially for a mental problem, it's very difficult to get them off the rolls."
And that observation is not lost on the rip-off artists.
Investigators in the San Diego and Seattle probes gave strikingly similar accounts of how crooked translators coach their clients to fake mental disorders instead of physical handicaps -- because mental disorders won't show up on an X-ray.
Bluffing through
Further, tests for psychological problems like post-traumatic stress and manic-depression are often highly subjective and can easily be foiled, if they are administered at all.
"The psychological examinations typically last eight to 10 minutes, and the translator answers most of the questions," said Schroeder, the federal prosecutor.
"We have cases of refugees who reported severe psychological trauma from witnessing their parents being killed and tortured in Cambodia, then we check their immigration files and find out their parents were with them when they came into the U.S. But they had no problem bluffing their way through the psychological exams and getting checks."
In Long Beach, Calif., where 15,000 residents are collecting $6.7 million a month in SSI checks, investigators identified one
psychologist who certified 300 SSI applicants as mentally retarded in a single year.
Relaxed rules
Today, about one out of three immigrants qualify wholly or in part on mental disorders, according to Social Security. And investigators agree that it is because of the relaxed rules Congress put into place in 1984 at the behest of disability lawyers and social workers.
Under the old rules, applicants had to prove they were suffering from a condition so severe it prevented them from holding any job. Now, they need only show that a combination of symptoms prevents them from functioning in a competitive workplace.
In effect, Congress expanded the definition of mental disability at the same time that it limited the number of jobs an applicant could be expected to perform. It also said that "pain alone" could qualify -- even if there is no medical cause -- opening disability aid to people with psychosomatic disorders that are difficult to disprove.
Further, the same generous rules apply to another Social Security program called Disability Insurance that lets workers who have paid into the retirement trust fund draw benefits early if they become injured or ill. It, too, has been hit by a sharp rise in mental disability claims.
"There also is little on the record to suggest that Congress recognized the dimensions of the revisions," the Congressional Research Service reported in a recent study. "The probability of being awarded benefits is greater now than it was in 1985."
And the probability that fraud will be detected once checks have been granted has dropped to something approaching zero.
"The whole game is won or lost at the application stage," said Agent Summers. "Once they get in, it's hard to get them out."
Social Security officials say they are painfully aware of the fact.
New avenue for fraud
Commissioner Chater cited recent efforts to hire more bilingual caseworkers and to set up telephone conferences so they can help other offices process immigrant claims. But the agency also is expanding its use of volunteer translators.
Lenore Carlson, the field operations chief, said such "freebies" save taxpayers money. But her caseworkers say it's a new avenue for fraud.
In one typical experiment, Social Security now allows immigrants in Bridgeton, N.J., to fill out applications at a Hispanic community center run by volunteers -- who turn the paperwork over to the agency's local office each day.
"We are now handling applications from people we have never seen or met," said Frank Comito of the American Federation of Government Employees. "We don't even know for sure that they exist."
CAN YOU QUALIFY FOR MENTAL DISABILITY?
Here is a list of symptoms that Social Security uses to determine whether an applicant is eligible for $458 monthly disability checks for emotional, psychosomatic or personality disorders.
Emotional disorders:
A. If you have four of the following, you may be depressed:
1. Loss of interest in activities.
2. Trouble sleeping.
3. Agitation.
4. Decrease or increase in appetite resulting in weight change.
5. Decreased energy.
6. Feelings of guilt or low self-esteem.
7. Difficulty concentrating.
8. Suicidal thoughts.
9. Hallucinations, delusions or paranoia.
B. If you have three of the following, you may be manic:
1. Hyperactivity.
2. Racing thoughts.
3. Uncontrollable talkativeness.
4. Inflated self-esteem.
5. Decreased need for sleep.
6. Easy distractibility.
7. Failure to recognize unpleasant consequences of actions.
8. Hallucinations, delusions or paranoia.
C. If you have a combination of the above symptoms, you may be manic-depressive.
Psychosomatic disorders:
If you have one of the following, you may qualify:
1. A history of unexplainable symptoms beginning before age 30 that resulted in unnecessary medication, doctors visits and changes in living habits.
2. Frequent disturbances of sight, hearing, speech, sensation or use of limbs with no known physical cause.
3. Unrealistic actions based on imaginary physical symptoms.
Personality disorders:
If you have one of the following ingrained behaviors, you may qualify:
1. Seclusiveness, unreasonable suspicion or hostility.
2. Odd thinking, speech or behavior.
3. Mood swings.
4. Chronic dependency, passivity or aggression.
5. Unstable relationships and impulsive damaging behavior.
Any of the above combined with at least two of the following may make you eligible:
1. Restriction of daily activities.
2. Inability to function socially.
3. Inability to concentrate or complete work tasks.
4. Deteriorating work quality.
6* SOURCE: Social Security Administration