If you are a single alien with no claims to a green card, and you are thinking about marrying a resident of this nation, your best bet is a U.S. citizen, rather than a legal permanent resident (LPR), because you are much less likely to become an abused spouse.
The universe we are dealing with consists of more than 1.1 million marriages during fiscal years 2008-2011. There were, in those years, by definition, that many aliens admitted to the United States because they had married U.S. residents and had sought visas as a result of that marriage. Within this population, the percentage of those who "self-petition" on the grounds of spousal abuse is 2.2 times higher for those marrying LPRs than those marrying U.S. citizens.
This is all based on (admittedly obscure) public data, and can be gleaned by looking through the recent copies of the Yearbooks of Immigration Statistics (table 7) published by the Department of Homeland Security.
A little background is in order: the phenomenon we are describing relates to marriages between non-green card carrying aliens, on one hand, and green card holders (LPRs) or citizens on the other hand. When such marriages occur the U.S. resident can file a petition with the government to set in motion a green card for the new spouse.
However, in a minority of cases, the wedding takes place, and the resident spouse becomes abusive, and the non-resident spouse — though this is not widely-known — has the opportunity to file for legal status in the United States without the assent of the spouse if that spouse can be found to have been abusive.
USCIS, with its flair for euphemisms, calls this process "self-petitioning".
How do we know that alien spouses are more likely to be found abusive than citizens in these cases?
All you have to do is to run some calculations from two sets of totally comparable numbers.
During FYs 2008-2011, a total of 1,078,645 marriages between U.S. citizens and non-green card-holding aliens led to the issuances of visas to the aliens in question. These are cases involving the immediate families of citizens. In 18,407 of these cases, the spouse in question self-petitioned. That works out to 1.706 percent.
During the same time span there were a smaller number of alien-alien marriages, 111,552 of them — these are family second preference cases — and of these 4,264 involved self-petitions, or 3.822 percent of the total.
The DHS statistics are silent on why this is the case, as you might expect. Currently the male-female ratio among those who self-petition is not published, but it is a pretty good bet that wives are more likely to be abused than husbands — so this is an alert to alien women thinking of marrying into the United States — chose a citizen!
If you want to know more about some of the intricacies of this process — such as the continuing eligibility to self-petition even, under the right circumstances, if the abuser is dead, deported, divorced, or has renounced U.S. citizenship, or presumably some combination of those statuses — check out this memorandum from a high USCIS official published in 2005.
All of this suggests that the nation, as a matter of policy, should look a little more carefully at how it hands out visas — as it does almost 300,000 times a year — to aliens because they marry residents of the United States.
