The phone call yesterday afternoon from CBS News puzzled me; the reporter wanted to know the extent to which proxy marriages played a role in immigration-related marriage fraud.
"It is certainly possible, but I have no specifics for you", I told the reporter, and wondered why the question was being asked.
By 6:00 a.m. today I knew the answer: a slightly wet copy of the New York Times carried a long, semi-serious story on the subject headlined "You May Now Kiss the Computer Screen".
The press has a hard time understanding that fraudulent marriages for immigration purposes are the acts of at least two criminals — somehow cutesy headlines and soft photos do not accompany articles on bank robberies.
The Times story focused on a familiar situation: The bride, Punam Chowdhury, 21, is a U.S. citizen and a resident of Queens County, N.Y.; the groom is a native of Bangladesh, presumably without any immigration rights to come to the United States, save the marriage. As is often the case, she is a citizen, he is an alien, they both have sub-continent connections, and they barely know each other. Some of these marriages work, some do not; some are legit, and many are not; some are forced by her family, some are not; the ingredients in this case are often seen in immigration-related marriage fraud. I do not know how to characterize this one.
In the instant case, according to the Times, "Their courtship, like so many others, had taken place almost entirely over the Internet — they had met in person only once, years earlier, in passing."
The article carried photos of the bride, including one of her at a computer screen with this caption: "Punan Chowdhury at the New York Qazi Office in Queens last month as she used a video chat service to marry Tanvir Ahmmed, who was in Bangladesh." Technically, the wedding "took place" in Bangladesh not in New York State, which sensibly bans such arrangements. New York, however, not so sensibly, routinely accepts foreign marriages unless something remarkable (and rare) suggests a major problem. Qazi is a marriage-facilitation organization.
So the groom, who has never so much as kissed the bride, is now on his way to legal immigrant status in the United States, and will be admitted outside any numerical ceiling.
Some immigration fraud elements of proxy marriages were touched upon, if lightly, in the news article. For instance, one matchmaker in the community said she had stopped organizing proxy weddings "after witnessing people being married and left brokenhearted by unscrupulous foreigners seeking a green card, not a life partner."
Also:
Such convenience [offered by the internet] has also raised concerns that it will facilitate marriage fraud — already a challenge for immigration authorities — as well as making it easier to ensnare vulnerable women in trafficking networks.
The practice is so new that some immigration authorities said they were unaware that it was even happening and did not typically provide extra scrutiny to ensure these types of marriages were not misused to secure citizenship … while [government] agencies ask interviewees for details of their weddings during the immigration interviews, they do not specifically inquire whether it occurred by proxy.
In other words, here is yet another a situation when the creative bad guys of the immigration world are miles ahead of an officialdom that I have characterized as "stupid cupids" rather than alert regulators. (In a previous blog I noted how forced marriages to create visas for alien males, another sub-continent specialty, were well known to both British immigration authorities, and pro-migrant women U.S. organizations such as the Tahirih Justice Center, but were unknown to DHS officials.)
A suggestion for Secretary Napolitano: You are well known as a staunch defender of women's rights.
Why don't you convene a day-long meeting between USCIS and ICE officials dealing with immigration-related marriages, and the representatives of organizations like Tahirih, to discuss how everyone can work together to prevent the abuse of citizen, green card, and alien women through marriage fraud? No restrictionist organizations need be invited (not that there is any danger of that). The meeting would be devoted to nuts-and-bolts discussions of various types of marriage fraud and forced marriages, almost always thrust on women by men, and how DHS can do more to protect the women involved. That this might reduce some immediate family migration would be an undiscussed, beneficial side effect.
