For Many Immigrants, Marriage Is the Fastest and Easiest Way to Get Legal Rights

Newsweek published this story under the headline "The Mating Game" on January 19, 1976. In light of recent news regarding legislation on legal immigration, Newsweek is republishing the story.

Ruth Zivoli was suspicious. As an inspector for the U.S. Department of Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in Miami, she was interviewing an older American woman and her new, young foreign-born husband. The couple was seeking a petition for the husband's permanent-resident status as the spouse of an American citizen. But Zivoli thought the woman, who had an unusual first name, seemed familiar. Ignoring the wife's protestation of newly married love, Zivoli checked the files to discover that the woman not only was bringing in her second new "husband" in three months but that she had also filed for six other "husbands," using various last names. How did she think she could keep getting away with it? asked Zivoli of the woman, whose case is before a federal grand jury. "She has a face you don't easily forget. All of her front teeth are gold."

It was not a singular or even spectacular incident. Immigration laws set quotas on the number of visas issued to immigrants (290,000 a year), but since 1965, they have made it easier for the spouse of a U.S. citizen to enter or remain in the U.S. As a result, fraudulent marriages have become a quick solution of the illegal alien's problems—and a massive problem for the INS. Last year, INS investigated 21,200 cases of fraud, many involving aliens from the Caribbean, Mexico and the Philippines. "Marriage and divorce are so easy in this country, we simply handed the aliens a ready-made solution," says one U.S. immigration officer.

Since a quickie marriage to a U.S. citizen can reduce an alien's waiting time for a visa from five years to three months, marriage brokers for immigrants are doing a booming business. "It's becoming a million-dollar business, especially in the big cities where there are professional rings," says Michael J. Nolan, director of the St. Louis INS office, which investigated 55 marriage-fraud cases in fiscal 1975. "One or two people may have a dozen women."

Kickback

The brokers, who function as travel agents, notaries public, lawyers or entrepreneurs, solicit willing partners who are often down-and-out divorcees, prostitutes, homosexuals or addicts in methadone clinics. For a fee ranging from $500 to as much as $3,000, the broker will arrange a wedding and provide the documents necessary to satisfy the immigration board. In many cases the American "spouse," who typically gets a 25 to 50 percent kickback from the broker, never lives with the alien, never consummates the marriage and may only see his or her partner once more when they sign the petition for the visa.

Despite the brokers, the majority of alien marriages of convenience are still arranged individually by relatives or friends. In San Francisco, where 50 percent of both the Chinese and Filipino population in the U.S. resides, immigrant Filipino women regularly fly to Nevada to get quickie divorces from their Filipino husbands. Then they marry sympathetic older Filipino men in San Francisco, get their resident status and divorce their U.S. husbands. Finally, they return to the Philippines where they remarry their former husbands and then apply to move their whole families to the U.S.

To stem the tide of fraudulent visas, the INS decided two years ago to crack down on phony immigrant marriages. Since then, the number of marriage-fraud cases under investigation in the San Francisco INS office has jumped more than 200 percent, to 450 cases this year. In Miami, officials denied 300 petitions for resident status by a spouse in 1974, compared with only 24 in 1973. Scared off by the increasing number of investigations, 35 percent of the applicants called back by the board were no-shows in Los Angeles last year; 50 percent in New York didn't return.

Towels

Those who do appear now face ultrapersonal scrutiny. Questioned separately, the couples are asked what color towels they used that morning, what they had for breakfast and the number of TVs they own.

To further satisfy their skepticism, the INS sometimes launches "field investigations." New York INS investigators recently made a late-night call on a 26-year-old alien Italian and his 72-year-old American wife to check if both sides of the bed were warm. They were, and the visa was granted.

Not many marriages, however, have such happy endings. A lot of aliens prey especially on the lonely and the elderly. Despite the fact that one determined young Israeli had been deported once for a fraudulent marriage to a 60-year-old widow, he managed to return again to New York, where he took a job at an old people's home. Shortly thereafter, he persuaded another elderly women to marry him. Though the woman was forewarned by the INS, her loneliness prevailed. Even after he stopped coming home, refused to support her and finally beat her, she was still reluctant to file for divorce and testify to fraud. "Maybe he'll change," she kept telling her lawyer.

Often, young alien women approach single elderly men, offering to live with them and care for their home. "We have a number of cases where elderly men—wanting one last fling—marry a voluptuous 18-year-old alien with hopes that life will start anew," says Gordon Davidson of the San Francisco INS office. "It usually doesn't."