Refugees are routinely coached as to what to say to authorities in order to gain asylum. NYTImes:

The man caught on the wiretap urged his immigrant client to fabricate a tragic past if he wanted asylum in the United States. To say that he was a victim of political repression in Albania. Or police brutality. Or even a blood feud.

“Maybe you had to leave because someone threatened to kill you,” the man suggested. “Because of something that your father did to somebody else or something to do with the land. You understand? That can be a way to get asylum.”

Often enough, it is. A shadowy industry dedicated to asylum fraud thrives in New York, where many of the country’s asylum claims are filed. Immigrants peddle personal accounts ripped from international headlines, con artists prey on the newly arrived and nonlawyers offer misguided advice.

The revelation that the West African hotel housekeeper who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault apparently lied on her asylum application has focused new attention on the use of these schemes.

The embellished stories go in and out of fashion along with the news of the day, reflecting turmoil in nations around the globe, lawyers say.

West Africans claim genital mutilation or harm from the latest political violence. Albanians and immigrants from other Balkan countries claim they fear ethnic cleansing. Chinese invoke the one-child policy or persecution of Christians, Venezuelans cite their opposition to the ruling party, and Russians describe attacks against gay people. Iraqis and Afghans can cite fear of retaliation by Islamic extremists.

Of course, thousands of those claims are legitimate. But each cataclysm provides convenient cover stories for immigrants desperate to settle here for other reasons, forcing authorities to make high-stakes decisions based on the “demeanor, candor or responsiveness” of the applicant. “When there’s a problem anywhere, a horrible slaughter in Somalia, wherever, the first couple of years of those cases are very real,” said Andrew Johnson, an immigration lawyer in Manhattan. “Then the next four or five years, they just mimic those stories.”

There is no reliable data on the pervasiveness of asylum schemes, but law enforcement officials say they are among the most common immigration frauds, and the hardest to detect and investigate. “Fraud in immigration asylum is a huge issue and a major problem,” said Denise N. Slavin, an immigration judge in Miami who is vice president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s accuser said in her 2004 asylum bid that she was gang-raped, and that soldiers destroyed her home, beating her and her husband, who she said died in jail. She recently admitted to prosecutors that she had been lying.

Her lawyer, Kenneth P. Thompson, said she was desperate to leave Guinea, and had been encouraged to exaggerate her claims. She told Manhattan prosecutors that a man had given her a recording of the asylum story to memorize.

The accuser’s immigration case is apparently not unusual.

A woman from Burkina Faso who lives in Harlem said she had recently acted as an interpreter for a woman from another African country, Mali. The woman had undergone genital mutilation, but told her lawyer she suffered no side effects. In court, the interpreter said, the Malian woman changed her story.

“People would lie to stay here because they don’t want to be sent back home,” the interpreter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she did not want to implicate anyone, said.

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Whether here legally or illegally, immigrants can apply for asylum within one year of arriving....

A man's word, swearing a solemn oath with one hand on the bible, apparently means nothing much to anyone anymore (see the Casey Anthony trial). We live in a world where only a fool would tell the truth when a lie will produce the desired result.