Sex and the citizenship process
lux-magazine.com
lux-magazine.com
My wife got her green card two years ago, through her marriage to me. We never considered sending them a sex tape, but we did have to attach lots of photos to prove that the marriage "real", and not just a front. I don't know how much the photos actually helped, since I don't think they actually looked at them, but instead the fact that we've had a shared bank account and shared mortgage for multiple years, but our lawyer made it pretty clear to show them as many photos as possible.
I could totally see the mental logic of sending some sex videos to prove the marriage was consummated, even if doing so isn't terribly well thought out.
The forms for marriage and fiance visas for the US are readily available for anyone to check:
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrat...
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrat...
"Throughout the process, the couples — and the noncitizens in particular — have little to no expectation of privacy. The noncitizens submit bank statements, detailed medical records (including regarding their sexual and mental health), criminal history, and biometric information."
Yes unsurprisingly a country wants to do basic background checks on people it is making permanent residents and then citizens.
The UK one for instance: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Meanwhile, after ignoring very small countries, countries like Australia and Switzerland have twice the percentage (about 30%) of immigrant residents than the USA, (about 15% — even Germany has more).
The US is a large country so the absolute number is higher than, say, Switzerland, but not by orders of magnitude.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/immigrati...
You're not wrong that the numbers on immigration percentages are a bit skewed but that's not a debate that I find worthwhile.
https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F34708/...
America isn't in some super exceptional situation where human rights need to be routinely trampled to preserve the nation.
If he hadn’t applied for the visa at that time, it’s almost certain he wouldn’t have caught it and wouldn’t be alive today.
He had no trouble getting approved for the visa - we were sponsoring him so we had already signed an agreement saying that we would pay for any government benefits he might receive over the next 10 years. So I don’t think people in this particular visa situation can be a burden on the system.
But this might not be how every visa in Australia works, I’ve got no experience beyond that.
This will not stop the worst from coming, at best; but might discourage the best from doing it. It’s stupid and inhuman.
Nowhere are questions about the couple's sex life asked about. The only question is if the person has been a sex worker (which is good to know to see if the person is being sex trafficked). They are asked about criminal record, sold drugs, or been a terrorist. Yes the person does a medical exam. The person does list their assets and work history.
America is actually pretty lax when it comes to financial support. The person petitioning for their spouse or would be spouse only has to earn 125% of the fed poverty line, that is less than $25k a year or about $12 an hour.
Nothing is inhuman in the questions asked and hardly different than what most other countries ask for. But this doesn't make for a good click-bait story, so some 'journalists' need to make vague insinuations to the contrary.
The system can be improved for sure but so much of what is alluded to just isn't accurate.
My own doctor couldn't do it, and previous medicals didn't count. I'd already had 7 years to transmit those diseases; a test prior to moving to the US would have made more sense. And with all of that, testing positive wouldn't even disqualify me, I'd just have to get treatment ... it just seems so laughably idiotic. Putting people through a Kafka-esque routine because immigration politics have been dysfunctional for half a century.
Non-immigrant visas don't require those tests. Why? I don't know. Clearly there are differences that don't make sense, but I'm assuming it's more related to how the law worked out in the end vs actual malice.
Also, a lot of these GC medical questionnaires more focused on people bringing in family members from oversees (as in sponsor them), and much less for people converting from a non-immigrant visa to an immigrant one.
An illiterate white person would have exactly the same problem as what you describe.
Likewise this immigration law is not about letting people in or not, that's the visa which is much more lax. And often follows another more temporary visa.
Benefits of being a US citizen are some, but not really enough in comparison to just being in the US which needs only the visa. (Especially business/employee visa.)
It's not a test for intelligence either, unless you explain to me how you need to be smart to be in a relationship. Stable employment (of one of the partners) is something, I guess, if it's checked, but that's a different immigration visa that is quite limited. The check for language is done at visa application... (See point of people already having a previous visa, usually.)
The standard for the "literacy tests" was roughly that you were exempt if your pre-1861 ancestors were allowed to vote.
Edit to add: The test questions were along the lines of "Name all of the judges in your state's circuit court" or [0]; note that both selecting the passage and judging the answers was left to the county registrar, and that it was left to their discretion whether it was necessary to administer the test to any given individual.
> Yes unsurprisingly a country wants to do basic background checks on people it is making permanent residents and then citizens.
I would point out that if you're native born, the government generally considers this stuff private and makes an effort to protect it (one exception: biometric information is collected from some government employees).
But anyways, they didn't seem to even look at the packet we prepared and granted my wife's green card, which was a relief because she was already 3 months pregnant at the time.
Some relationships are harder to fake than others.
Be glad that your temporary visa doesn't expire. That's... not common in other countries.
Edit: and I just want to make clear that I'm not criticising the Australian government in any way with these comments. Please don't deport me.
I do have an EU citizenship as well, and in fact I'd lose that if I became an Australian citizen.
(the Permanent Resident visa can be renewed online in about fifteen minutes when it expires, they just want you to attest that you still live here)
Technically you don't have to renew your permanent residency unless you leave Australia (but then you have to renew your temporary visa, too). Also you can apply to be a citizen after ~4 years of permanent residency while you can't apply if you only have a temporary visa.
As I understand, it would not be possible in to do the reverse in Germany or most other European countries without waiting many years and getting married.
They are more experienced. There are not so many people who want to live in Japan.
Maybe the Anglophone countries' governments are just evil and want to take advantage of the high demand by charging huge fees? But even here, it doesn't make that much sense because a lot of the total costs are for an immigration lawyer to handle the byzantine procedures, not government fees, so this just looks like corruption.
The fees to have a work visa in EU are very low. Under 200€. However some african people I've met told me that the european embassies only accept applications through some agencies that charge 10x as much.
I can easily imagine money is changing hands there.
So all up, not that unreasonable. Although, it is a hurdle for many people, including lots of Sydney Uber drivers I've had lately.
Full disclosure: Have done this for Oz (I recall more like AUD$8K but that was a few years back), currently going through US non-immigration visas in prospective immigration as an entrepreneur, it's a PITA. Spoke to the HN immigration lawyer dude last year. Despite good advice, our situation is not helped by certain relevant websites running on Salesforce and being down, Chrome-only, nor by 3-4 month post-COVID wait times for certain non-immigrant visa interviews required by immediate family...
https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/getting-a-visa/visa-li...
I think you mean the obligation to vote. :) Aren't you paying more in taxes and/or losing out on social benefits if ever desired? Say you want to buy a house, larger stamp duty? Have kids, less/no subsidy? Something something medicare benefits?
The Requirement to vote :-P
The guy picked newspaper from the outside stand in front of store and walked away thinking it was usual free stuff. Well it was not. Few minutes later he was arrested, ended up being convicted and eventually deported as he was not citizen.
I forgot my US passport (I think - it was some doc that was optional but strongly encouraged to bring along the day of the interview). There was a quick, whispered couple bicker of “what do you mean YOU forgot it?!” Keep in mind we are sitting 4 feet from the officer. The officer heard it.
The officer looked up at me and smiled.
To this day I claim that was the moment that sealed our applications approval.
I wonder what they did with our wedding photos and photos from family gatherings.
I believe it. There's a reason "bickering like an old married couple" is a cliche.
To ease her nerves, he said to a random stranger that their marriage was really a scam. She was screaming at him to stop and he was laughing.
Of course, the random stranger was their interviewer. He said it was pretty solid proof they were married.
What a stupid system. Why are we still doing this in 2023?
FWIW, I suspect that this tactic works far more often than the article implies. If your desk has piles of these applications, and they all claim to be based on the legal requirement of a consummated marriage, and half of them have photos as described in the article (of the happy couple making love under a waterfall), aren't you going to give those more credence (even if you aren't supposed to)? Of course you are.
This is a huge country with plenty of room, friendly people, fresh water, and lots of work to be done. I have no interest in my state deciding whether my new neighbors are wanted.
Western culture is difficult to bootstrap, and requires effort to maintain. In the US, civics are taught to all of your children through the education system. People have shared mythologies about freedom and duty and senses of right and wrong. Even with this, there are strong frictions between traditions.
If you resettled a city of people from Sudan or Afghanistan to a western city, those people would not suddenly become western by virtue of their new geography. In Sweden in the last twenty years, inadequately managed immigration has created a gang and gun crime culture.
I am astonished when I see westerners advocate for open borders. I think it comes from a mistaken assumption that live and let live is the default order in the world. It is not. Live and let live is a hard won cultural achievement, and needs to be tended.
We breed them and export them, which help exacerbate and sustain a lot of the stability problems in Central America.
There is no precedence for lots of folks from ones location suddenly flooding a country just because they now can. There were huge fears Puerto Ricans would do this. Yet once they got the right to move to US states, only very, very few immigrated. It took up a little more once a Puerto Rican exclave formed somewhere and friends and family started following existing immigrants.
Immigrants typically commit fewer crimes than the native born population.
I am currently in Malta and have had several conversations with hire car drivers who are living in difficult circumstances because they came here on boats as part of a plan to get to the UK and got stuck. There has been a significant controversy in the last month in the UK about that government’s attempts to dissuade unauthorised entries.
It is an ongoing project for European governments to manage fallout from the syrian civil war. Some of these people need to be monitored for terrorist tendencies, adding pressure to law enforcement.
In the US there is an ongoing project to ensure appropriate controls on its southern border.
These thing are happening right now, across the western world. Large investments from western governments trying to stay in control of their immigration arrangements.
but these people came as refugees, and the borders were opened for them. without the war, they would not have come.
so basically, for refugees, the borders are already open, and most people who are not refugees would not come even if borders were open for them too.
I would not call it "some level".
You just need the competence, physical fitness and vehicles to cross the border offroad and not at the border station.
Even an island you could get there via an appropriate vehicle (a boat) and many people do from Cuba to the Us and from Africa to Europe
The policy you are referring to would be more aptly characterized as ‘oper welfare state’ or’safety net for all people geographically located in the land’
And I think we conduct a better service by walking back our welfare state and allowing many more people to join us.
It's like they need to come see you having sex and making babies to be really sure.
I am married to another immigrant: We had been a couple for quite a few years before marriage, but we did sign papers right away when, through some strange USCIS situation, a whole lot of visas that weren't going to be processed for years became current. She was still in school, so the green card process wasn't available to her yet. If we got married, she would skip at least 6 years of her own green card process, and it'd not cost anyone any extra. This also meant that she could go to any employer, instead of having to look for one sponsoring immigrants: A huge difference.
If it was far easier to become a US citizen, then we'd not have such pressure to sign papers, either for legitimate marriages or straight out fabrications. But it sure seems that the US has no appetite to, say, triple the employment-based visa caps, which I suspect is as much as we'd need to clear up that side of the system, once we take into account the Chinese and Indian side of the backlog.
No shit, what are these people thinking? after all of the years of hardwork to get the citizenship, they would just send it for what? for fun??
"The fact is, the government does tend to view certain types of unions as more “legitimate” and certain types of spouses more worthy of citizenship. “Expectations of sexual intimacy are implicit in all of the laws around family reunification for [mixed-status] couples, and I think some couples try to make it explicit in order to demonstrate the legitimacy of their relationship,” said Jane Lilly López, a sociologist at Brigham Young University and the author of Unauthorized Love: Mixed-Citizenship Couples Negotiating Intimacy, Immigration, and the State.
Is it any wonder that couples misread the subtext and send in NSFW stuff?"
"The burden is on the applicant to establish that he or she is in a valid marriage with his or her U.S. citizen spouse for the required period of time. A spouse of a U.S. citizen must submit with the naturalization application an official civil record to establish that the marriage is legal and valid. If an official civil record cannot be produced, secondary evidence may be accepted on a case-by-case basis. An officer has the right to request an original record if there is doubt as to the authenticity of the record."
(https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-12-part-g-chapter...)
By definition this means that some marriages are treated differently from others.
USCIS instructs you to provide proof that you're in a 'real' relationship, and half the people in the world are below-average at exercising good judgement... Or at parsing weird written and unwritten bureaucratic rules.
Not everyone has all of these things as evidence to a sufficient extent, but most people will be able to provide enough of them to convince immigration. If they can't, if they are lucky, they may get a request for more evidence, instead of an outright rejection.
IANAL.
But I can easily see how it'd go wrong. If you spend your visits impersonating rabbits, what proof do you have? If you spend more time on snapchat than the phone, what proof do you have?
There's an old trope of "yes, I do have a girlfriend. you wouldn't know her, she's from another school." She lives in another city, she's from Canada, etc. How do you expect your friend to prove their claim? Now replace the playground with INS/USCIS.
It ends up being a very vague question because there's no set limit of what level of evidence you need to reach, you just need to "satisfy" whoever opens that file.
The second time, I wrote a photo-story instead of just packing in a pile of 4x6 prints. "Here's us dating, here's us married, we took this trip here, this other trip there, here's my partner and her child with my parents and one of my siblings, here's me meeting her parents, here's our wedding, here's me and the kid, here's all of us at various events, here's us celebrating an anniversary," etc.
Same address (and checked by immigration official) means you already have a temporary visa. (Same address in another country does not count, easy to fake.) So they already let you in...
Having paid some US bills would be a hardest one but it does not substantiate the marriage.
All the other stuff? Trivial to fake. These days, even a lewd sex picture can be done without the act.
The best one is pregnancy validated as one of the parents'. Kind of expensive.
See where this is going? If they don't want to let you stay forever, they will find an excuse.
An American can get married to a foreign national, and the marriage will be recognized for tax purposes.
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Yes, you've listed all the various ways that a vindictive USCIS can screw someone applying for a spousal Visa. That's very clever and all, but is irrelevant for the vast majority of applicants.
And the ones for whom it is relevant are going to benefit more from speaking to an immigration lawyer, than running over what-if-wargames in their head.
People adjust (or gain) status all the time while they are here already in US on some other visa. Having a temporary visa is has no good or bad effect on getting green card. Its similar (easy or difficult) in other countries as it is in US, its not "easy" in other country(ies) to fake address if it is not easy in USA.
Pregnancy (removed from all facts, sole pregnancy) is never on its own a proof of bonafide relationship. Who is the bio father? The whole collection of proofs when seen as collective, tells the picture & intent.
USCIS & agencies has to follow a manual & policies & procedure (much of it is published on USCIS's website), & 99% of the time the officer can not intentionally bring a personal bias (exceptions apply). There are millions of cases getting passed, & a single USCIS employee does not decide a single case. Like any other big organisation, everybody is doing apart of process. & they have managers, & managers above them. Even USCIS itself is not above law, people routinely sue USCIS in federal courts to challenge their decisions (or lack of decisions).
The article dances around the subject a bit, but I think that the answer to your question is still clear:
They do it because, in their minds (and let's face it, they're not wrong) it will undercut questions about whether they are serious about their claims to be in a consummated marriage, which is the legal requirement.
And, as the article points out, this tactic does sometimes work (which is also not a surprise).
I don't understand criticizing the people submitting what is common-sense evidence of what the system requires. If you want the "porn" to stop, then change the system.
A bit? The article is absolutely atrocious. It's one of those mind-numbing creative-writing pieces that make you want to scream "get to the #!$%ing point!" at your computer. But then you just calm down and reach for the back button.
It's the kind of writing that gets people to cheer for ChatGPT and Co. in the hope that soon all these writers will be looking for a different job.
The first time, years ago, they "lost" a packet of information we had to reconstruct at great pains, and then had to get a second physical because they lost the report from the first one. We only found that out after getting our state's federal senator's office involved.
The second time, we ran into both rapidly-changing immigration requirements[0] and a pandemic, which made it super-unclear which issue was more relevant to the seemingly-interminable wait of years.
The instructions are vague in the best of times, and even immigration lawyers have no idea what a given USCIS staffer will care about on any given day. A rejection can mean anything from another year or two in the queue to a demand to leave the country and the life you've built within 30 days, so the stakes are high.
In my most recent application packet, I did include a photo I wouldn't publish online. While it featured no nudity, it was taken in bed. The same photo rotates through a digital frame on my desk in a house with a child in it, so it's by no means risque, but that is why people send in photos you might consider unwise.
0. I can't think about this without offering my best wishes and condolences to Mrs. Miller, who married the architect of that immigration nonsense the same year I married my partner.
Maybe it helps for some people, but if that's the case then the system is rigged
There had been a large group of people from a particular country who all attended a church together here in the US. They had affidavits and bank statements and so on, but most or all of the photos were actually group photos in which the happy couple were circled.
Somehow it all came unraveled, and it turns out that the couples weren't couples at all. They were all as a group close enough to share bank accounts and addresses and so on, but not romantically. Very, very strange, the details I was able to get, but that's another wrinkle.
I think yes, the system is rigged, but also, a lot of people want to immigrate pretty desperately. In some cases, that leads to lying about romantic relationships, and in others, apparently, going way out their way to prove they are not lying about that part!
"What other evidence do these people need that we have not yet sent!? Do they want to see us f***?"
It seems some people get more frustrated than others.