Hello, I Love You, Won’t You Tell Me Your Name: Inside the Green Card Marriage Phenomenon
By David Seminara November 2008
David Seminara joined the CIS as a fellow in 2009. He was a tenured member of the U.S. Foreign Service from 2002-2007. He served as a consular officer in Skopje, Macedonia, from 2002-2004; Port of Spain, Trinidad, from 2004-20055; and Budapest, Hungary, from 2006-2007. Mr. Seminara has a B.A. in Management/International Business from Villanova University and is currently is completing a book on visas and immigration.
Anything worth having is a thing worth cheating for.
— W.C. Fields
After September 11th, the existential question of “Why do they [foreigners] hate us?” was hotly debated in the American media without any real conclusion ever being reached. This Backgrounder seeks to answer the opposite question: “Why do they love us?”
Key Points
Marriage to an American citizen remains the most common path to U.S. residency and/or citizenship for foreign nationals, with more than 2.3 million foreign nationals gaining lawful permanent resident (LPR) status in this manner between 1998 and 2007.
More than 25 percent of all green cards issued in 2007 were to the spouses of American citizens. In 2006 and 2007 there were nearly twice as many green cards issued to the spouses of American citizens than were issued for all employment-based immigration categories combined. The number of foreign nationals obtaining green cards based on marriage to an American has more than doubled since 1985, and has quintupled since 1970.
Despite these statistics, marriage fraud for the purpose of immigration gets very little notice or debate in the public arena and the State Department and Department of Homeland Security have nowhere near the resources needed to combat the problem. Attention to fraud is not just for the integrity of the legal immigration system, but also for security reasons. If small-time con artists and Third-World gold-diggers can obtain green cards with so little resistance, then surely terrorists can do (and have done) the same.
An overwhelming percentage of all petitions to bring foreign spouses or fiancés to the United States illegally (or to help them adjust visa status if they are already in the United States on non-immigrant visas) are approved — even in cases where the couple may only have met over the Internet, and may not even share a common language.
Marriage to an American is the clearest pathway to citizenship for an illegal alien. A substantial number of illegal aliens ordered removed (many of whom have criminal records) later resurface as marriage-based green card applicants. Waivers granted to those marrying U.S. citizens can eliminate ineligibilities for green cards, including the 3/10-year bar on entry for those with long periods of illegal presence.
The decision-making authority for green card applications lies with USCIS officials who rely almost exclusively on documents, records, and photographs, with little opportunity for interviews or investigations. Consular officers reviewing cases overseas do live interviews and can initiate local investigations, but may only approve petitions, not deny them.
Here is the link to the whole article,even though it was written in 2008 it is a very interesting article for those contemplating marriage to citizens of other countries. http://www.cis.org/marriagefraud
