Juan Pedroza's research featured in the ABA Journal

Underreporting makes notario fraud difficult to fight

If you need to understand a problem in order to solve it, lawyers who fight immigration legal-services fraud are in trouble. Accurate data is impossible to get, they say, because it’s extremely underreported.

One potential solution: making victims of immigration legal-services fraud more comfortable coming forward.

Juan Manuel Pedroza, a PhD student in sociology at Stanford University, has studied what conditions might be helpful there. After analyzing FTC complaints from different areas, he concluded that complaints tend to be higher where people have greater access to legal aid, as well as places where more Hispanic families receive food stamps. By contrast, he found that areas with more deportations and greater local support for Republican candidates had fewer complaints.

Click here to read full article