A former consular officer with the U.S. State Department says there's far too little attention being paid to a problem that has been a significant contributor to the problem of illegal immigration -- green cards obtained through fraudulent marriages.
The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has released a new document called "Hello, I Love You, Won't You Tell Me Your Name: Inside the Green Card Marriage Phenomenon." It was written by David Seminara, who adjudicated thousands of marriage-based green-card applications in several countries while serving in the State Department. Seminara says marriage is the quickest way to get a green card, judging by the fact that over the past ten years more than two-million foreign nationals have obtained permanent residence cards through marrying an American citizen. "Of that 2.3 million over the last ten years, the overwhelming majority are legitimate relationships -- but there's tens of thousands of fake ones out there as well," he explains. "And unfortunately...one of the oldest tricks in the book for people who are looking to get to the U.S. or who are here illegally [and] who want to legalize their status is to marry a U.S. citizen." Two characteristics are prevalent in these marriages, according to Seminara. "It's most common in developing countries, [with] the obvious suspects [being] Mexico, the Philippines, Brazil. Countries that send us the most illegal immigrants are the places where this is most prevalent," he adds. "And American men tend to marry foreign females more frequently than American women marry foreign men. " Seminara says marriage fraud for the purpose of immigration receives very little notice or debate in the public arena, and the Departments of State and Homeland Security have nowhere near the resources needed to combat the problem.
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