Natasha Lennard writes on the differences between a green card marriage and a marriage which happens to procure a green card.
Lennard claims her piece isn’t a reflection on enduring persecution faced by couples who truly want to be married despite their different nationalities. But since she’s writing the piece in Salon and since she provides hints that she’s a bit of a rabble-rouser and a liberal, it’s safe to say that she disagrees with the ways that the Feds go about trying to tease out which marriages between citizens and green card applicants are legitimate and which are not. For what it’s worth, Andrew Sullivan believes that the process is an “absurdity”. Lennard writes:
I don’t have a green card marriage. I do have a marriage green card. The process to get it, as anyone who has gone through it might attest, was a dizzying, panic-inducing bureaucratic obstacle course; a strange lesson in state determinations of love and partnership.
…
“How did you meet?” the terse woman at the USCIS asked my partner at our green card interview in early 2012, a few months after our wedding.
…
Proof of love when it comes to green cards is something both specific and ephemeral. The idea is to show, as our immigration lawyer explained, not only that you love each other and want to be together in this country, but that you would have gotten married anyway. It’s an important hypothetical, which technically gives the government insurmountable leverage. Proving what you would have done anyway is impossible, and this is the catch. The possible world in which borders and governments don’t threaten to tear people who love each other apart is too far from this one to speculate over. I don’t know what I might do there. What place marriage would have in such a world is another question entirely.
Most couples pass muster when it comes to the would have done it anyway condition. In 2011, 270,761 couples applied for green cards through marriage and only 7,290 were denied. But what gets to count as proof?
When amassing evidence of love for the USCIS, a couple essentially aims for a facsimile of doing what people who get married anyway do — which, going by government guidelines, refers to anachronistic, income-stable, middle-class American Dream aspirants. Such people barely exist among all-American couples, let alone green card hopefuls, but the simulation persists between the lines of USCIS guidelines for proof.
So you’d expect that Lennard had a difficult time convincing the Feds that hers was a legitimate marriage. That wasn’t the case:
Our green card interview went smoothly. We had been a little concerned — I had been arrested a few months earlier while reporting when Occupy stormed the Brooklyn Bridge, and my partner has what you might call an active history of dissent. My charges were dismissed by a judge, but paranoia prevails when so much is at stake. (My partner doesn’t have a passport currently; I still fear flying across the Atlantic, just in case, for some reason, I can’t get back.)
Lennard should really just come out and say that she disagrees with the government’s various limitations on immigration. Because the Feds could do a lot more to make sure that those applicants are legitimately married. Lennard points out that just over 3% of green card applications based on marriage are rejected. I know personally of at least 10 sham marriages. Just based on anecdotal evidence,very many more sham marriages make the cut compared to the number of legitimate marriages that don’t.
Instead of following a couple or automatically checking their Facebook page or interviewing their friends, the Feds ask a few pointed questions. Big deal. If there is to be a barrier to entry at all then it has to put up some sort of resistance. If the most treacherous gauntlet such a couple faces is the question “What is her mother’s name?”, then this says much more about the futility of the system than it does about its hegemony.
And lawyers naturally suggest that applicants at least follow and display some vestige of the American Dream. The point here is to fly under the radar. To get the federal agent to move on to the other case lying in his pile. If a couple wants to get through that pile quickly and not basically force the agent to spend more time looking into the case, they follow the pattern. Lennard should next write a piece about how she faced some tough questions from a job interviewer and then reflect, perhaps on Labor Day, about how she’s merely meditating on the guidelines for someone proving that they’re a good employee.
Making an imperfect system more perfect will depend upon your idea of perfection. If the goal is to limit fraudulent marriages then something even more invasive than “how did you meet?” would be useful. If the goal is to grant all comers a green card – hell, just get rid of green cards completely – then perfection looks quite different.
A different direction for an essay would be to look at how two people may be drawn towards what they believe is a legitimate marriage because of the green card carrot looming off in the future. Maybe a woman really does love a man a little bit more because of what he can offer her just by his natural citizenship and financial sponsorship. How do we determine if that love is as legitimate as another kind of love? Certainly many marriages are based on similar superficialities. That topic might be less attractive to a place like Salon because it implies that attraction can be based upon incentives rather than some romantic notion of human attraction.
Another point worth mentioning: discussing the overreach of the Feds as if this infringes on some sort of right afforded to citizens obscures the fact that the Feds are vetting non-citizens.
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With a 2% rejection rate I would guess most of them are Americans attempting to sponsor a second or third green card spouse – a green card is something worth paying for.
Women can be very pragmatic when choosing a spouse, a big wallet can overcome a lot of other shortcomings in a prospective spouse.
If a man brings in a foreign bride who offers to pay him $$$ out of her earnings over a few years until she reaches unrestricted green card status and then they mutually divorce there really isn’t much the gov can do except to prevent a repeat performance.
I wonder what the obamacare status is for a pending greencard person
In 2005, my coworkers and I learned of a fat female one dept over who had all her bills paid by a Muslim student yet they lived apart. Didn’t sit right with us right after 9-11. Fat chick got paid though.
This trend of autobiographical advocacy/journalism is annoying. It must work on libs and simpletons who feel an argument has more autority is the writer is going through it right now.
I think liberals are split on this. If the sponsor spouse is a diverse naturalized or anchor citizen then this is going to compute as Good to them, but we’ve seen them get very angry and try to label it “human trafficking” and “exploitation” if the sponsor is a fair-haired provider-beta type.
Of course the real solution, were America still a nation rather than a human dumping ground, would be that there are no green card marriages. Just as there should be no birthright citizenship.
You should only achieve the status of citizen, and the rights and goodies that come with it, if you were born in America to two parents born in America. Which means children of immigrants do NOT get citizenship, and as such can be deported for any reason, but the children of their children do.
Getting citizenship should be very, very difficult, and NOT having it should mean you do not get ANY public benefits of any kind. No welfare, no healthcare, no public school for your kids. You want the immense privilege of being an American citizen, well you have to earn it generationally.
But in any case, right now immigration should be zero, deportations massive (including deportation of anyone here born to illegals), and the goal should be to reduce the American population back to 150 million.
I also believe Santa Claus is bringing me a unicorn today. But this is what we should be doing.
I’ve seen lots of green card marraiges where its obvious there is no “true love”. Usually the citizen is less desireable then the non-citizen in the market value sense, but the green card makes up for it. This is very common for ugly beta provider types to marry skinny foriegners.
“Feds go about trying to tease out which marriages between citizens and green card applicants are legitimate and which are not.”
Indeed. When working on obtaining permanent residency for the foreign spouse, you are both interviewed by an ICE agent whose job it is to decide if you’re a real couple or not. Applicants (US citizen sponsor and the foreign fiancee) are advised to bring photos of the two of you on dates and other evidence that you’re a bona fide couple. The ask you things like the color of each others toothbrush, and things like that.
The agent who interviewed us — I was in my early/mid 30s then and my fiancee in her early 20s — HATED HATED HATED me. She gave out an enormous Ivy League lesbian feminist vibe, and kept trying to trip me up on facts. My demeanor was one of amused mastery layered with crocodile-grin politeness, and I’d produce every kind of documentation she’d ask for. I was genuinely amused by the process. At one point she asked me with a note of exasperation “are you a lawyer?” She ended the interview by telling my fiancee “make sure you get an education and know your rights as a woman!” or something to that effect. Good times.
By the way, I believe we were the only white couple in the entire waiting room filled with hundred of other applicants that day.
Now is probably as good a time as any to marry a foreigner. With travel being cheap and the internet, she won’t get as homesick. That being said, I married someone who grew up near me and I do see some benefits to that. At least he can’t complain to me about our crappy culture.
Wow, Natasha Lennard is nowhere near as ugly as I envisioned her.
I know an Irish illegal alien in this country. He can’t travel home, because he won’t be let back in. Some of his SWPL friends were trying to make me feel sorry for him over this.
Ten years who I knew a zillion young Eastern Europeans with expired visas in the US. Most were college students here originally on work-study. A few married and stayed here, most returned home. They tended to delay returning because they were making good money plus it was a fun time for them. The few I keep in touch with returned home, finished college, started families.
I assume most of you guys are well to do. What do you cae about immigration. The bad stuff will never touch y’all.
“I assume most of you guys are well to do.”
Why? it’s been shown repeatedly that the alt-right blogosphere is generally lower-to-lower-middle-class in cultural and economic demo.
Lennard’ essay and its various allusions to her involvement in “progressive” casues and activism, its rather hypocritical to for her to go and complain about bureaucratic requirements imposed by the intrusive state she’s been cheerleading her entire career.
Why? it’s been shown repeatedly that the alt-right blogosphere is generally lower-to-lower-middle-class in cultural and economic demo.
really? by who? Where? which blogs?
Only about 25% of Americans even have a Bachelor’s degree. I’m inclined to think that the readership on this site, at least, is well ahead of that mark.
The Alt-Right bloggers and virtually all regular commenters seem either young, or they seem solidly middle class if they are older. This included the occasional black Talented Tenth fellow traveler, lol.
You would think Nikcrit was born on a manor somewhere, instead of a black guy, with all his class snobbery. I consider myself upper middle class.
Yeah, I get the impression most of the commenters here are middle to upper middle class but maybe I’m just projecting. I’d consider myself from and upper middle class background.
You would think Nikcrit was born on a manor somewhere, instead of a black guy, with all his class snobbery.
yeah, Nik the black folks back home would call you “high sadity” with all of that uppityness.
“You would think Nikcrit was born on a manor somewhere, instead of a black guy,”
Haha, but hardly: I come from parents with middle-class and lower-class backgrounds; all their wealth and status accrued gradually th rough their professional careers, so my background too was a slow-rise from lower-middle-class to upper-middle.
I think, through my own fault, I was misunderstood; I define class ranks a bit different than some: I consider class a measure more of socio-economic birthmark and predicament than educational level or financial wealth regardless of how it was gained.
To me, some big-name rapper worth millions is still ‘lower-class’ in terms of who he aims to please and where his psychological demons and desires stem from; while a third-generation Ivy-league graduate worth less is still upper-middle-to-uipper in terms of who and what compels him, etc.
And I don’t equate intellect or intelligence with class rank; (I think I even discussed this with you and PA a month or two ago when we were talking about immigrants and ‘working-class’ ethos.
The Alt-right is mainly middle to lower-middle and that makes sense going by a common alt-right observation: SWPL’s and their liberal social and racial attitudes are partly the direct result of their NON-involvement and lack of direct contact with NAM and immigrant pathologies and other social circumstances; while those in the alt-right develop their supposedly more sobered, practical and cynical view of race in part because they have to deal with it in their everyday circumstances.
When I re-read that comment I now see I didn’t really convey that even vaguely, and it does come off a bit arrogant, but that wasn’t my intent.
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I guess my story fits with Nitcrit’s hunch. Grew up working class white, back when there was still such a thing. Family had to move as neighborhood was increasingly NAM’d up, break-ins happening all over, car thefts, etc. So I have had plenty of contact.
Made myself into middle-class, definitely not upper middle-class in wealth, taste or attitude (except that I spend a lot of money on expensive food, my only SWPL vice).
Managed to largely shield my children, now adults, from the Joys of Diversity as they grew up. My son was always highly NAM skeptical, and a few years of living in Tampa solidified his hunches. He is totally HBD now. Daughter is way more Liberal, but mostly she’s very pro Gay. There are virtually no NAMs in her circle (think “Girls,” literally), and those few that are there are artsy or gay types. And she hates the Chinese, god bless her!
This stuff really bothers me, I see it happen sometimes twice a month. an “undocumented worker” is brought to jail who cant speak (or claims not to), any English, has no education what so ever, and his “girlfriend” blows up my phone trying to get marriage licence/notary info so they can get married ASAP! the mega dead giveaway is the “girlfriend” needs a interpreter to be the go between for the soon to be happy couple, because neither speaks the others language. I often wonder how the courtship progressed… exotic charades, notebooks filled with stick figure diagrams?
stickman,
something else that often happens and which makes the Feds really suspicious is when the illegal is served a deportation notice and then winds up married.
i’d like to find stats on this. i wonder how many marriage interviews take place after the immigrant has been served those papers. i bet it’s a lot more than the 3% rejection rate.
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