1. The K-1 “fiancé visa” program What is it? The
K-1 visa lets a foreignfiancé of an American citizen into the U.S. on the condition that the couple marry within three months of arrival. The visa category was created in 1970 to allow American soldiers who’d served in Vietnam to
bring back their betrothed in a time when it was quite difficult to do so.
In 2014, around
35,000 of these visas were given out, making up only about 0.3 percent of the 10 million total visas issued that year by the U.S. government.
Why is this visa now under scrutiny? Tashfeen Malik, the wife and accomplice of San Bernardino gunman Syez Rizwan Farook,
came to the U.S. on a K-1 visa in 2014. Digging into the couple’s past after the tragic shooting,
The New York Times has reported that the couple had been plotting violence
as far back as 2013. Malik had expressed her extremist views on social media, but this information
didn’t come up in the vetting process because social media messages of visa applicants is a civil liberties issue, a former DHS official told
ABC News. What’s happening with the K-1 now? Following the San Bernardino shooting, the White House has
asked for a review of the K-1 program. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
will also be looking into the other K-1 cases approved in the last two years to make sure they didn’t miss anything.
What effect will this review have on national security?It’s unclear. Although the K-1 vetting process is
not as strict as, say, the refugee vetting process, it’s still more rigorous than other non-immigrant visas, the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh
points out. K-1 is the smallest category of non-immigrant visas, and the only one that requires background checks, biometric screenings, and rounds of interviews (to weed out marriage fraud).
The majority of immigrants currently receiving these visas are also not arriving to the U.S. from regions around the world that
U.S. politicians consider dangerous, such as like Syria and Iraq, writes Nowrasteh:
<blockquote> The top ten countries for sending fiancés are the Philippines (17.34 percent), China, Vietnam, Mexico, Colombia, Russia, Dominican Republic, United Kingdom, Thailand and Canada. These top 10 countries are responsible for 53 percent of all K-1 visas issued. Russia is the only country in the top 10 that [Rand Paul] considers a risk, and none of them are majority Muslim. You have to go all the way down to number 21, Iran, to find a majority Muslim country. Pakistan is 23rd.
</blockquote> If the K-1 program is, in fact, tightened in the future so that an applicant’s social media posts are fair game, perhaps cases like Malik’s would be caught. But that change might also open up a pandora’s box of profiling, Cyrus Mehta, a New York City-based immigration lawyer writes
at his blog:
<blockquote> While comments relating to causing violence should be taken seriously in the visa application process, it is hoped that harmless comments made in the exercise of free speech in opposition to US policy or events, such as feeling disgust about Donald Trump’s statements regarding banning Muslims or criticizing US drone policy, should not be used as a basis to play “gotcha” during the security screening of a visa applicant.