I thought that her coverage began with an assumption that women are being trafficked and then went on the prove that theory by seeking out agencies aimed at helping the victims of abuse.  If your goal is to create awareness and then possibly get legislation similar to the US legislation enacted, then the piece probably worked well for that goal.

If the goal is to truly examine the phenomenon of mail order brides the piece fell short.  It failed to showcase the cold hard fact the pedophiles also use mail order bride services to import child victims by marrying desperate poor single mothers.  It also failed to show the flip side of the story.  Not all of the men are monsters looking for subservient women.  Some are.  You can tell who they are in a 5 minute conversation just by the way they refer to women as objects or commodities.  Other men, I would say the majority, are lonely and looking for love.  They often feel that they will not be able to find a woman in the US either because of their age, financial situation, the fact that their jobs do not afford them the time to date, or many other reasons.  Those men enter these marriages with the intent of having a good marriage and providing for their wives. 

There are also many men who are victimized by the women.  Often they are used for immigration status.  In the US, the VAWA Act has even created what I believe is an offensive trend where women file false allegations of abuse to get around US immigration laws.  Not every woman entering the US on a marriage or fiance visa is a helpless, meek, blissfully ignorant kitten.   Many understand the system.  They seen other women use marriages to western men to get citizenship and then immigration benefits for their whole families.  Some have even been advised about how to use VAWA to get out of the marriage and get citizenship regardless of the virtue of the claims of abuse. 

I have been a practicing immigration attorney for 6 years.  I have never had a client contact me to tell me that she was abused and needed VAWA.  Mostly because when I take a call or email from a perspective client and I sense that he has an abusive, derogatory attitude, I refuse to give him my services.  I have heard stories from women (not my clients) about abuse and have advised women on VAWA.  For every story of an abused woman, I get an equal number of calls or emails from men who have been used and spit out.  Often they say they are victims of false allegations of abuse (usually mental and financial as you don’t need to have any physical proof of that type of abuse).  Often they have proof in the form of statements or emails that they were completely used for immigration.  Many times the wife is advised by family and even former husbands/fiances/boyfriends that she only needs to hang on another year or two, get citizenship and then she can ditch the man.

Any serious journalist who wants to cover this issue in immigration needs to show that the mirror has two faces.  Often the men are equally deluded as to what they can expect from foreign brides as the women are about what they can expect in western life.  You have to show that this issue is complex and varied.  Some women and children are victims, others are victimizors.  In the end, people need to make smart choices about who they marry.  That goes for foreign brides and western men.  If you would not marry a person you met at the night club two days later, you probably should not go on a bride search trip and marry a woman from Thailand 3 days into it.

despite some claims to the contrary, illegal immigrants don’t have the same rights that citizens or legal permanent residents have.  Fear is eroding our country.  The fear of getting caught and deported rips at the social fabric of our nation and erodes the ideals that this country was founded on. 

Illegal immigrants are taken advantage of by slumlords who know that they cannot report poor and often illegal living conditions. 

Illegal immigrants are taken advantage of by unscrupulous employers who exploit their fear of deportation and desperation to work to pay they substandard wages, fail to withhold taxes from their pay, fail to carry insurance on those employees, get them to work without being compensated for overtime.  Also, they do not provide them with health insurance so they are forced to go to emergency rooms for health services or use a legal resident’s health care coverage by pretending to be that person (yes that does happen). 

Illegal immigrants don’t report crimes that they witness or that they are the victims of and that includes gang violence, domestic violence, etc. 

The victimization of illegal immigrants is a problem for all Americans.  We are all harmed when some people abuse the rights of other people.  Our country, our republic only works if people have a voice and an ability to participate in government.  If you have an enormous groups or 20-30 million people (plus their US citizen children) who are divested of the liberties granted by our constitution and government, then you have an erosion of the essence of what it means to be an American.  We cannot have illegal immigration without divesting ourselves of the values we hold dear.

The silence of illegal immigration also takes a huge financial toll on the American people.  I’m talking about health care costs, education costs, social service costs, the skyrocketing burden that crime places on our courts and prison systems.  I am also talking about the costs to businesses who follow the rules.  Businesses who hire legal immigrants are at a disadvantage.  If you have to pay taxes, pay health insurance, pay into retirement plans, pay minimum wage and overtime, you are at a disadvantage to businesses employing illegal labor.  This goes for landlords are well.  Legitimate developers who actually obey housing regulations are losing money in the long-term because they have to compete with slumlords who rent to illegal immigrants. 

So, in sum, we have to fix our illegal immigration situation to keep ourselves from paying the social and economic costs of illegal immigration.

It is really a multi-prong issue.  First, many illegal immigrants work on fake paperwork.  In other words they are buying fake social security cards off of the black market and working with those cards and other IDs. 

Then there is ID fraud.  When my former husband legally immigrated to the US, he knew many people working here illegally.  Many of those people got ID, like driver’s licenses from paying small bribes to workers at the DMV, etc.  Don’t think that it doesn’t happen even in America because it does.  Especially in areas where the immigrant population and the people staffing the DMV are the same nationality. (I just want the add a caveat the all of my husband’s papers are legal and legally obtained.)

Beyond fake documentation, there are other ways to work.  There are companies who simply don’t care that you are illegal and will actually take advantage of this.  Cash businesses like lawn care, house painting, food service, etc are in the thick of this.  A restaurant can have servers who are illegal immigrants working for nothing but cash tips.  The employees are never on the books, so there is no worker’s comp on them.  They don’t complain about not getting their minimum wage because they want to work and their illegal status makes them unable to report violations.    A cash business can also pay its workers in cash before the money ever hits the books.  You can pay your entire kitchen staff in cash before you report the sales and then you have not only hired and paid illegal immigrants, but also avoided paying SS taxes and taxes on business revenue. 

Illegal immigrants can also work by working under another person’s social security number.  This isn’t the same thing as document fraud.  I want to make that clear.  This involves person A, Maria, allowing her husband or brother, an illegal immigrant, to work under her number.  In this scenario the person who hires the illegal immigrant knows that Mark is doing the work, but Maria is being paid. 

You also have illegal immigrants who own their own businesses.  They are no rules in most states preventing an illegal immigrant from owning a business.  So, you can have people who bring money into the country or save it from working who are able to open businesses in the US.

Finally, you have many people working under FIN.  That is a Federal Identification Number.  This little number lets a person work as a subcontractor.   No taxes are taken out of subs pay because they are a business and are supposed to pay their own taxes.  Do you think that those taxes are ever paid?  FINs also let one person who may be legal work a crew of 5-10 or more illegals and pay them cash from his personal checking account.  So, in this scenario, Jose hangs drywall and gets paid by Drywall Co.  Jose pays his crew of 10 guys cash for the work.  Drywall Co. hired Jose who is legal and has all of the paperwork to prove it knowing that his whole crew is illegal.  Because they are not employing illegals, they cannot be fined. 

So, as they say, there are many ways to skin a cat.  The estimated net cost of illegal immigration is 67-87 billion annually, which amounts to about $166-$226 per year per US family.  Recent estimates place the amount of money sent back to Mexico by illegal immigrants yearly at 8-14 billion yearly (which is larger than their tourist trade folks).  So, all of the implications that the illegal workers are benefiting our economy by dumping the money they make back into the US economy are based on false logic.  If that were true, the government of Mexico would not actively be protesting border security.  Do you see the Canadians protesting border security?  No.  That’s because the US is not supporting 25% of their economy with illegal gains.

I came to the conclusion that these women have two major things in common. They are older than their fiancés (by ages ranging from 3-15 years) and they met online. Why should either of these two issues present a big problem? After all, many, if not most of my male clients met their fiancés online. Almost every one of them is at least 5-15 years older than their female fiancé. This surely could not be the reason.

Then, I started researching Morocco in particular. It seems like there was a “wave” of internet dating and foreign marriage after Europe tightened up on its immigration requirements. By a wave, I mean that about 4000 Moroccan men married foreign women last year. The US granted about 350 fiance visas to Moroccans last year. But, somehow, this “wave” is seen as a threat.

Russia, China, and the Philippines have been exporting women to the US for years as fiancés and spouses. Obviously, these women are looking for something more than love. You don’t have to cross the ocean to get love. I’m not saying that love doesn’t play a part in the story, just that it is only one factor in a variety of factors that drives these women to seek out foreign husbands. Of coarse these women want to leave their mostly 3rd world countries to try to have a better life, a life with options, freedom and prosperity.

This is all okay with our government. Men get approved by the hundreds every day having spent 7 days with a girl who is 15 years younger and barely speaks English. Yet, I am seeing women who have been married for 2-3 years or dating for several years, who have made many trips overseas and spent weeks and months living with their husbands/fiancés getting denied or held indefinitely.

I will give it to USCIS that men, especially from the State Sponsors of Terrorism countries pose a greater security risk. But, apart from that it has really become clear to me that women are being treated unequally by USCIS and the State Department. They are more likely to be denied visas for their husbands and fiancés, up to 67% of denials based on cause are cases of women petitioning for their husbands/fiances. That is DOUBLE the denial rate.

I think that these denials are rooted in deep prejudices we still carry. USCIS seems to be playing big brother to these women trying to oversee or second-guess their decisions. It is perfectly fine for a thirty-something man to marry an eighteen-year-old girl. But, if a woman marries a man se as been dating for over a year, visited on numerous occasions, and just happens to be five or seven years older … Hold the presses. She is getting taken advantage of. This must be a unilateral marriage. She needs protection. Deny that visa.

Frankly, I am disgusted and I will be researching even further and gathering all of my statistics for a further article on the matter.