Court: If you want to become a US citizen, don't defraud your local health insurer

A Cameroonian national has had his bid for American citizenship quashed because he'd defrauded Harvard Pilgrim Health Care of nearly $12,000, and that's not the sort of moral turpitude we want in our new citizens.

In 2005, three years after becoming a permanent resident, Janarius Elanjwe Nanje pleaded guilty to fraud and larceny charges for submitting two false claims to Harvard Pilgrim for medical care in his native Cameroon. The insurer paid the first claim, but then investigated the second, concluded he'd never gotten any care for either claim and turned the matter over to authorities.

Elanjwe, married to an American and having four kids here, agreed to repay the initial claim plus the $8,000 Harvard Pilgrim spent to investigate the two claims and his case was dismissed the next year - but still on his record.

In 2013, the federal government rejected his request for naturalization - because federal law says any loss of more than $10,000 constitutes an "aggravated felony" that is a bar to citizenship. Nanje had tried to get around that by convincing a Boston Municipal Court judge to split the $12,000 initial fraud charge into two $6,000 charges - one on the fraud charge, one on the larceny charge.

Nope, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston ruled yesterday. The local judge's ruling came years after the initial plea, was clearly sought only because Enlanjwe had decided to try for citizenship and it didn't change the fact that Nanje effectively defrauded Harvard Pilgrim out of more than the federal maximum. Or, as the decision by the three-judge panel, written by Judge Bruce Selya, starts:

The lead-in to a serialized radio program, wildly popular in the mid-1900s, warned that "the weed of crime bears bitter fruit." In his quest for naturalization (which rests at the epicenter of this appeal), the petitioner has learned that hard lesson at first hand.