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A Reader Asks What All the Fuss Is About; He Says Illegal Aliens Don't Need Any Help

From: Brendan Gordon

Re: Joe Guzzardi's Columns: The Fiancée Visa Racket and Fiancée Visa Means Unhappy Valentine's Day

I have been following with some interest the debate on whether fiancée visas are good or bad. I myself am a 24-year-old single man, currently enrolled in a doctoral program in chemistry.

On one side we have frustrated men who are burned out on American women and, fed up with the pickings, look overseas for mates.

On the other hand, there are those advocating for America's women. Curiously enough, both sides insist that their side is at a disadvantage.

To solve this once and for all, I decided to examine the Census 2000 data a little more closely.

Using the Factfinder tool, and the Census 2000 Summary File 4 sample data set, I found a rather interesting picture.

When one crunches the numbers by age, it appears that from 20 to about 35, when most people get married for the first time, women have a distinct advantage.

The number of single men 20-34 was 15,435,183 in the 2000 Census. The same figure for women was 12,292,036. That's 796 women for every 1,000 men.

Men who complain about the unfavorable sex ratio in speed dating events, or who claim that all the good women are taken may have valid grounds.

People on the other side, such as Mary Rose Maguire, might note that there are "28 million single women over 35 but only 18 million men".

Perhaps this is simply a marketing ploy by Maguire to make the situation seem worse than it actually is for women because the actual census figure is 7,137,537 never-married men and 6,141,930 never-married women over the age of 35.

Clearly, Maguire's conclusion seems unsupportable. What truth it may have is based on the fact that there are 2,619,442 widowers over 35 and 11,849,940 widows.

This large overhang occurs for two reasons. Firstly, women live three to four years longer than men do. And secondly, women traditionally marry men who are a couple of years older than they are.

The result is an excess of elderly women who linger around for a decade or so after their husbands die.

The net effect of this is a large number of frustrated young men and a similar large number of lonely old women.

Somehow I doubt that they'd find happiness with each other, anymore than (as Steve Sailer would point out) Asian men and black women would with each other.

To find a cause, it would appear that the situation was exacerbated considerably by the bust in the birth rate between 1960 and 1975 because on average men are a couple of years older than their wives.

Those men born in the late 1960s suddenly faced more competition for a smaller number of women born in the early 1970s.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if the huge crash in the birth rate has something to do with the neediness and desperation that many men of marriageable age exhibit and the spoiled happy-go-lucky attitude that  their female counterparts often demonstrate—and which men who use mail-order bride services complain about.

And as most people know, neediness turns off women—including those born in the Philippines and Russia.