The 'Dominican Bernie Madoff' Defrauds Immigrants

To follow up on my last post about notario fraud, it turns out New York City immigrants have their own Bernie Madoff.  His name is Victor Espinal, and he built a thriving business on the fraud of his nonexistent license to practice law.  Over the course of 17 years, he built his fortune on the wreckage of thousands of shattered dreams.

But like Madoff, Espinal could only succeed in a dysfunctional setting.  A healthy, well-regulated immigration system would have detected and prevented this kind of abuse.  And like Madoff, Espinal is only the most egregious example of a whole class of charlatans.  The notarios who don't get their pictures in the papers will continue to profit from a broken system.

And, to stretch this analogy a little further, the hedge fund managers and bank CEOs who brought the whole economy down won't face any serious consequences because what they were doing was technically legal--just as dodgy immigration attorneys can cause as much harm as Espinal and make more money doing it.

Even now, Espinal's defrauded clients will have little relief. 

In the last days of the Bush administration, the so-called immigrant-friendly president authorized a serious attack on legal protections against negligent legal advice.  Even under the pre-Compean procedures, bad advice from a notario was often considered no defense in an immigration case.  This passage from Nina Bernstein's NY Times article on Espinal is about 90% right:

Until recently, incompetence of legal advice was grounds to reopen a deportation case, and the Obama administration is widely expected to reinstate that possibility. But that policy won’t help Mr. Espinal’s clientele, because it does not cover bad advice from fake lawyers, [Reichart] said.

“You can’t make ineffective assistance of counsel argument,” she said, “because there is no counsel.”