David Seminara was a tenured member of the U.S. Foreign Service from 2002-2007, serving abroad as a consular officer in Macedonia, Trinidad, and Hungary. He currently is completing a book on visas and immigration.
"Hello, I Love You, Won’t You Tell Me Your Name: Inside the Green Card Marriage Phenomenon" addresses a subject that includes me directly, since my own Green Card is the result of a fiance visa. He details problems that aren't getting much attention, including organized marriage fraud rings, importation for the sex trade, uses of the system by terrorists, mail order brides with individual histories of visa fraud, et. al.
Seminara even documents one case in which an American citizen had a tape recording of her "husband" admitting to that their entire marriage was a sham, so that he could secure a green card and then import his real wife. Was his green card revoked? No. Then there was this:
"Some who broker bogus marriages do so by exercising authority over those they employ or supervise. During my tenure in Skopje, I interviewed several native-born American waitresses who worked at restaurants owned by ethnic Albanian immigrants from Kosovo or Macedonia. The women were filing marriage-based immigration petitions for friends or relatives of the restaurant owners. The common threads in each case were that the Americans had no connection to the Balkans, had never traveled internationally, and claimed to have accepted free trips to Kosovo or Macedonia as bonuses from their bosses. Only one of the women — after a lengthy interview during which I informed her of the penalties for marriage fraud —admitted that her boss had strongly implied that she might lose her job if she didn’t agree to take what the boss referred to as a “business trip to Kosovo” to marry his nephew."
Seminara offers a number of suggestions for reform, and most of them are intelligent, but he misses a couple of important points from the other side of the desk:
(1) If we eliminate the "K visas" per his recommendation, America would eliminate the K-3 (married in a foreign country) as well as the K-1 (fiance) visa. He may have only meant the K-1s, since he recommends that Americans marry in the appropriate foreign country before seeking the visa. If so, he should clarify. I know I looked at both options, and either would have been fine with us.
(2) He proposes to do away with some of the adjustment of status from short-term visas to marriage-related visas, and that makes sense because the person should be expected to go home, set their affairs in order, et. al. if they were telling the truth about their original visit. But his proposal needs to understand the other side.
It often takes a year or more to apply from one's home country, and that during this period an absurd rule prevents visits to America by the applying individual. If he wants to firm up the system, he'll also need to remove the ridiculous visiting restriction at the very least, as a matter of basic consideration and fairness to real relationships. Rather than placing all the expense and (more important) vacation time burden upon the American. Canada has no such provision - and every American I've ever talked to about this thinks it's loony.
Seminara's suggestions, abreviated:
- Eliminate Fiancé (K) visas.
- Adjudicate marriage-based immigrant visa petitions in the foreign spouse’s country of residence, with the American sponsor present. Authorize consular officers (or overseas USCIS officers) to rule on the validity of the relationships and deny fraudulent petitions [not currently the case].
- Eliminate waivers of ineligibility for marriage-based green card applicants with criminal convictions, involvement in a criminal street gang, or long periods of illegal stay, unless the health or welfare of their citizen spouses or children would be severely affected.
- Create a national marriage registration database to help combat serial marriage fraud.
- Create a third option for USCIS adjudicators, allowing them to extend a "conditional" green card (must be married for 2 years) for up to three years.
- Deny all applications filed by couples that cannot hold a basic conversation with each other in a common language.
- Eliminate the co-sponsor system for Americans filing immigrant visa petitions for spouses overseas.
- Eliminate the possibility of adjustment of status to anyone out of status or on a short-term visa.
- Give both the State Department and USCIS significantly more resources to combat marriage fraud.
- Require USCIS officers to seek the assistance of overseas consular officers when conducting investigations on suspect cases.
- Give American spouses all immigration-related documents that the interviewing officer has access to, including previous tourist visa applications, case notes, criminal histories, etc.
- Investigate claims of marriage fraud made by American citizens who only realize that their spouses were “in it for the green card” after they receive permanent residency.
- Deny visa petitions for foreign spouses who previously have been divorced from an applicant. This will eliminate the opportunity for a foreign national to divorce his or her spouse, enter into a fake marriage with an American citizen to gain legal status, and then divorce the American and re-marry and sponsor for immigration his or her original spouse.
- Aggressively prosecute everyone involved in marriage fraud, from those involved in personal schemes to large-scale marriage fraud rings. Penalties should include jail time for those convicted.
An interesting read. My wife came here on a K1 Visa; and we'll be married 12 years on this coming March 1st. Getting her to the US was relatively easy. Sure, there was paperwork; but nothing unrealistic or excessive.
The hard part - 99% because of the U.S. consular officials in their country, who set up some major (administrative review hell) roadblocks - was getting her kids here. They've been here now for 8 years, and are all voting U.S. citizens. One even served with the U.S. Army in Iraq "before" he became a U.S. citizen.
Did you catch the 60 minutes article last week, about wives who applied for a visa, waited for 1-2 years before finally getting a hearing, and by that point there husbands had passed on. (one was in Iraq working for blackwater-type corp).
Now, despite the fact that they have kids in country, they're in legal jeopordy of being kicked out.
I would guess this problem (and the problems you reference here) are both symptoms of another problem: there is too much work to do here, and not enough people to keep up with it. Add a bloated immigration system, and the program will fail on both counts: it will fail to get justified individuals into citizenship, and it will fail to keep unjustified citizens out.
Here's the link to the transcript
Rampant population growth threatens our economy and quality of life. Immigration, both legal and illegal, are fueling this growth.
I'm not talking just about the obvious problems that we see in the news - growing dependence on foreign oil, carbon emissions, soaring commodity prices, environmental degradation, etc. I'm talking about the effect upon rising unemployment and poverty in America.
I should introduce myself. I am the author of a book titled "Five Short Blasts: A New Economic Theory Exposes The Fatal Flaw in Globalization and Its Consequences for America." To make a long story short, my theory is that, as population density rises beyond some optimum level, per capita consumption of products begins to decline out of the need to conserve space. People who live in crowded conditions simply don’t have enough space to use and store many products. This declining per capita consumption, in the face of rising productivity (per capita output, which always rises), inevitably yields rising unemployment and poverty.
This theory has huge implications for U.S. policy toward population management, especially immigration policy. Our policies of encouraging high rates of immigration are rooted in the belief of economists that population growth is a good thing, fueling economic growth. Through most of human history, the interests of the common good and business (corporations) were both well-served by continuing population growth. For the common good, we needed more workers to man our factories, producing the goods needed for a high standard of living. This population growth translated into sales volume growth for corporations. Both were happy.
But, once an optimum population density is breached, their interests diverge. It is in the best interest of the common good to stabilize the population, avoiding an erosion of our quality of life through high unemployment and poverty. However, it is still in the interest of corporations to fuel population growth because, even though per capita consumption goes into decline, total consumption still increases. We now find ourselves in the position of having corporations and economists influencing public policy in a direction that is not in the best interest of the common good.
The U.N. ranks the U.S. with eight third world countries - India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Uganda, Ethiopia and China - as accounting for fully half of the world’s population growth by 2050. It's absolutely imperative that our population be stabilized, and that's impossible without dramatically reining in immigration, both legal and illegal.
If you’re interested in learning more about this important new economic theory, I invite you to visit my web site at OpenWindowPublishingCo.com where you can read the preface, join in my blog discussion and, of course, purchase the book if you like. (It's also available at Amazon.com.)
Please forgive the somewhat spammish nature of the previous paragraph. I just don't know how else to inject this new perspective into the immigration debate without drawing attention to the book that explains the theory.
Pete Murphy
Author, "Five Short Blasts"
From my "You couldn't sell this as a script" department:
From a 2008 California Court of Appeals opinion:
That same month, Lilia found out who the other woman was when she overheard a conversation between Jorge and Lilia's sister Blanca. Jorge had begun an affair with Blanca prior to the 2001 marriage, and it lasted until 2005. The intercepted conversation occurred in 2005. Lilia asked her teenaged son Victor to call Blanca, who babysat for Jorge and Lilia's daughter, on her cell phone to inquire if she would be joining them for lunch with the child. Blanca, at a restaurant with Jorge, had the cell phone in her purse.
Instead of pressing the stop key, she pressed the button to answer the call, so the conversation she was having with Jorge was overheard on Victor's cell phone, which Lilia and Victor listened to by activating the loudspeaker. In this conversation, Jorge professed his love for Blanca, assured her that they would be together once he got his share of money and property from Lilia, and told her that he had only married Lilia to gain permanent residence status. This conversation occurred after Jorge had moved out.
It occurs to me that at a time when the nation is flooded with literally millions of illegal immigrants who just walked across the border, there's something odd about obsessing about a few hundred thousand, tops, who entered from more distant nations by fraud. It might even be viewed as a deliberate effort at distraction.
Anyway, my wife, the love of my life, arrived by fiancee visa, and it would have been a royal pain obtaining enough vacation time to spend long enough in the Philippines to marry her there. I doubt I could have managed it. So thanks for your desire to keep me lonely and single.
That might be true if one sees what Joe is talking about solely in the context of trying to stop illegal immigration (of which it is certainly part albeit a minor part). But one of the goals of immigration reform is also to improve the process for the people who are trying to follow the rules.
“Comprehensive immigration reform” got a bad name when it included what was (wrongly IMO) labeled an “amnesty” for people who had broken the law but now wanted to follow it. There was so much controversy and opposition to anything that might be labeled an “amnesty” that it not only prevented getting the enforcement that many opponents of the McCain-Kennedy bill said they wanted, it also prevented making improvements to make things easier for legal immigrants who wanted to follow the rules while giving a much-needed reexamination of what those rules were and whether they needed to be updated.
So no, I don’t consider it a “distraction” but rather a good-faith attempt to see if can try to fix at least part of the immigration system even if we don’t have the political support for a more comprehensive approach.
I have to agree with Brett. Given the problems we face right now, I wouldn't want to make this a high priority or expend too many resources on this type of reform. I know we can all walk and chew gum at the same time, but marriage-immigration reform would be tied with a 1,000 other problems at 301st of my top 300 priorities.
I'm a little skeptical about the story of waitresses not being able to turn down free trips to Europe in order to hang on to their waitress jobs.
But one of the goals of immigration reform is also to improve the process for the people who are trying to follow the rules.
I assure you, as somebody who DID follow the rules, that eliminating fiance visas would not have improved the process for me one bit. What's the abuse rate, how many people who AREN'T cheating are you going to screw over to merely inconvenience the ones who are?
Publish a freaking flow chart of the process, instead of scattering the details hither and yon for people to laboriously track down, if they can't afford a well paid immigration law expert. THAT would help.
Brett,
I'm in the USA on a K-1 right now, so this isn't some random opinion.
For me, a K-3 marriage visa, with visitation rights while my application was process, would have improved the whole experience. Sharply. Instead of forcing my wife to burn all of her vacation time and more, or not be able to see me. That was ridiculous.
And yeah, a flowchart would have been far too sensible and transparent for government work.
But let's bring some data into this conversation. Let's say you were required to get married in the Philippines. I don't know how stuff works there, so I'm curious how it all would have played out for you.
1. We met online. Remarkably, within days of each of us registering for the site. Love at first sight.
2. During the first visit. I made two.
3. Philippine law stretches it out a bit, there's no Reno there:
http://www.weddingsatwork.com/laws_foreign_marriage.shtml
Also, of course, we had been told the finance visa route was quicker.
Yes, spending a year apart was a pain, no less so for being engaged rather than married. Online chat was a life saver.
Now we've been married a couple of years, have a beautiful little baby boy, and are just hoping we can save up the money for a return visit so her side of the family can see him.
I can see why you'd think a right to make visits during the wait would improve the marriage visa. Doing that doesn't require getting rid of the finance visa. I think the problem here is displacement: The government will NOT do anything about illegal immigration from Mexico, but is under considerable pressure from the public to do something about illegal immigration, so they 'respond' by making life harder on people immigrating legally.
I met my wife when she arrived on a B-1 visa to interview for her medical residency. The reforms you have laid out (specifically not permitting adjustment of status for someone on a short term visitor visa) would have led to that B-1 being converted to a J-1 and the breakup of our family when she would have had to leave for the required time after she had finished her residency.
The AoS process can be used legitimately and it would be cruel to entirely shut it down.