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December 07, 2007

An Immigration Lawyer And Fiancée Visa Specialist Agrees With Joe That Changes Are Needed

By Joe Guzzardi

How about this for your Christmas present from VDARE.COM?

A New York immigration lawyer agrees, in large part, with my long held opinion that the K-1 fiancée visa is deeply flawed.

And he should know—his specialty within immigration law is that very K-1 visa. By the way, this is the second letter from an immigration attorney who expressed common ground with VDARE.COM. A California lawyer wrote to say he agreed with us on diversity training (but not on immigration). We’ll take what we can get!

Last week, I wrote about the long shelf life of my VDARE.COM columns—and how, even six years later, they are perched on top of the Google list of returned items when their topics are typed into the search box. 

This is not only flattering, but also proof that whatever money you donate to VDARE.COM pays dividends well into the future.

Now to today’s topic: among the most widely-read of my columns in cyberspace are ones that I wrote about the widespread abuses of the fiancée visa. Rarely a week goes by that someone doesn’t write me about his or her rotten personal experience bringing a foreign-born fiancée to the U.S.

Many have told me that shortly after their marriage, kids from a previous relationship—who knew?—grandmothers, grandfathers and just about every cousin in the village are on his way to America.

After the entire family is safely and legally lodged in the U.S., the process to take the unwitting spouse to the cleaners begins.

This pattern, repeated over and again, is a testimony to the adverse effect on the U.S. population explosion and our national sovereignty. That’s what happens when unnecessary non-immigrant visas meet chain migration. 

In some other cases, the unsuspecting visa holder finds when he arrives that his spouse-to-be is considerably less desirable than advertised. What often follows shortly on the heels of the intended’s arrival is often a life of sexual abuse or abandonment.

To be sure, not all marriages end sadly, as other readers have attested. But the ratio of failed unions to successful ones that involve fiancée visas runs, at least according to our mail, about 10-1.

I can confirm that ratio based on my own observations from the classroom with my many students who have come to America on fiancée visas.

One of the recent readers of my first fiancée visa columns that detailed the nightmarish situation one of my students found herself in is the aforementioned immigration lawyer, Salvatore Paszynsky (e-mail) 

Paszynsky wrote me that:

“I came across your column titled “The Fiancée Visa Racket.”  I am an attorney in New York and part of my practice is immigration law; my site is fiance-k1-visa.com.  The situation you described is, unfortunately, all too true and common.  But please keep in mind that all lawyers/firms are not like the attorneys you described.  There are many legitimate instances where U.S. citizens meet foreign nationals and wish to come to the U.S. to get married.  Eliminating the K-1 visa would be like throwing the baby out with the bath water.”

Intrigued that a legal expert mostly agrees with my view that the K-1 visa creates more problems than it solves, I wrote Paszynsky back and asked him to elaborate.

His reply:

“Following are more specific thoughts I have on the issue.

“You raised two issues in your article.  The first issue was what you perceived to be the victimization of your student.  A man nearly three times her age brought her to the United States and then left her—without a job or skills, without money.  On this point I disagree that she was a victim.  I suspect that she, like many foreign nationals, was desperate to come to the United States and saw marrying that man as a way to do so.  She knew what she was getting into and voluntarily participated in the masquerade. 

“The second (and I think more important and relevant) issue concerns the all too common abuse of the K-1 visa.  People's motivations for getting married cannot subjectively be documented, characterized or justified.  Therefore we are dealing with one of those legal gray areas that is practically impossible to sort out. 

“Short of eliminating the K visa entirely (which, as I stated, would be akin to throwing the baby out with the bath water), I think some questionable K visa recipients inevitably will still slip through. 

“Nevertheless, I think some improvements could be made to the system. 

“In your article you describe how your student was the third bride who this man brought to the United States.  My first suggestion is to limit the number of times a United States citizen could sponsor a foreign national for a fiancée visa. 

“My second suggestion is that the foreign national be scrutinized more closely in their interview with the Embassy Consular Official with regard to their relationship with the American sponsor and their motivation for getting married.  Again looking to your student, her age relative to her sponsor should not by itself have excluded her, but it should have raised a red flag. 

“My final suggestion is to consider legislation to regulate these so-called ‘mail-order bride’ services.  This must be done carefully because certainly it should not be illegal to provide a service where people are introduced to each other.  But the reality is that some of these services are nothing more than a systematic end-run around our immigration laws.”

Needless to say, I agree 100 percent with everything that the Paszynsky wrote. Note that diligence at the U.S. consulate office could scotch many visa applicants with dubious intentions.

Like so much else in the morass of immigration, when controls aren’t imposed—as in the K-1 visa and its non-immigrant visa cousin, the H-1B—the situation balloons into an untamable mess.

During the five years I’ve been following K-1 abuses, the foreign bridal websites have multiplied by a factor of ten.

Would you like a bride from South Africa? Then go here. How about Vietnam? Try here. You’ll find lots of eager women in China at this site.  Thais, Cambodians and Filipinas are just a plane trip away here, here and here. (Note of special interest: check out the happy couple on the Filipina site; see if anything strikes you as odd.)

Even—oh the shame of it!—hard-up Italian women are dying to meet you here.

Despite our enlightened views, Paszynsky and I are unlikely to see any changes in the K visa in our lifetimes.

But the “mail-order bride” services do have one advantage—if you can call it that.

Unscrupulous parties on the make can sign up at the dating service of their choice to travel abroad where they’ll meet lots of women willing to trade quick sex for a shot at a green card.

Read about the Russian adventures of two scoundrels I meet during my research, Sam and Dave. According to Sam, not only are the women easy but also “You don’t have to buy dinner.” I wrote about the confirmed bachelors and their experiences (very favorable from their perspective) with dating agencies here.

As we all know, American citizenship is given away on the cheap these days.

But does it have to be cheap and tawdry, too?