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> In reality immigrants do not commit more fraud. Less fraud then? The exact same amount? That would be surprising, given wildly different circumstances. This

• EdwardDiego 4y ago
  > In general, doesn't ik make sense to scrutinize recent immigrants when handing out free money? That has little to do with skin color. Hey congrats, you're not racist, you're xenophobic! A good system scrutinises everyone equally when handing out free money. A system that scrutinises immigrants more thoroughly is a bad system that will fail to catch fraud when it's committed by people born there, just because investigative resources are finite, so a focus in one area necessarily reduces investigations elsewhere. Also, let me tell you an anecdote to illustrate why it's the people born there you really want to keep an eye on. In the early 2000s, I worked in my country's social welfare department, interacting with customers and ensuring they had full and correct entitlement. On my caseload were a notorious couple, who knew more about social security law than we did. Our social security law pays a slightly lower rate of benefit per person when you're in a "relationship in the nature of marriage" compared to the rate you'd receive single. And this couple had spotted a potential loophole through close reading of the Social Security Act 1964. Sure, they had kids together, and lived together, and had been married for years. But, what if, what if you claimed that the wife had just realised she was a lesbian, was now in a committed relationship with another woman, and only living in the house with her husband to look after the kids? That'd be two single benefits right there right? (The answer was no, because the definition of "relationship in the nature of marriage" didn't require you to be having sex, because, plenty of married people don't) These people, they're born and bred, and they'd grown up in intergenerational poverty, so they knew the laws very well. A migrant would not be able to compete with them at all in a benefit fraud contest, they lack the institutional knowledge. TL;DR - everyone who is poor and wants to be less grindingly poor has motivation to commit benefit fraud. So what makes you think migrants are more likely to act on that motivation than locals? Do you genuinely believe desperately poor Dutch people would abstain out of honour or national pride or, I dunno, something else equally implausible? Just my anecdote, of course.
  • vanviegen 4y ago
    > A good system scrutinises everyone equally when handing out free money. Good in what way? Cost-effective or fair? I grant you the second point. > everyone who is poor and wants to be less grindingly poor has motivation to commit benefit fraud. Sure. But being a small country with (what uses to be) a generous welfare system obvious leads to relatively many (fake) immigrants with fraudulent intentions. Just a numbers game. But I guess you could call it xenophobic to take that into consideration when semi-randomly selecting people for extra checking.
    • EdwardDiego 4y ago
      I'd argue is both cost-effective and fair to be as unbiased as possible. But then it really depends on the nature of the fraud you're mentioning. Is it people lying about their qualifications for entitlement? Not declaring income?
      • aquarium87 4y ago
        Everyone should have equal rights, if not under the law, then under God. Discrimination is discrimination. Its simply not allowed. Yet if all roads lead to an accurate picture of reality, and reality is not equitable, How is any investigation ever to be opened? A neighbor is suspicious and watches an immigrant family like a hawk and reports things to bylaw and police? It's discriminatory in nature, yet legal because a human observed a predicate. I think that is what we have to keep in the future. A human must witness the predicate for an investigation. Even that is flawed. But AI is on a whole other level.