Love in the time of visa fraud, mail-order marriages and deportation

There were pictures of many Ukrainian women inside of the manila envelope 49-year-old Rick Convery received every week from his marriage agency. But of all the Ukrainian women who sent their photos and letters, he chose 34-year-old Veronica to be his wife.

"She was a beautiful woman, for starters," Convery said in a recent interview. "But her letter was what really did it for me."

All of the women's photos Convery had looked at in European Connections, a mail-order-bride catalog, were beautiful, he said. This was 10 years ago, in 2000. Convery, who runs a house-painting business on Martha's Vineyard, wanted a change. He'd spent much of his youth "in a rock and roll band," and had never married.

"I have a friend out here who's an attorney. I was in his office one day and he handed me this brochure," he continued. "At the time, I thought it was something I was gonna play around with a little bit, because here on Martha's Vineyard, you get to know what everyone's act is, you know? I thought I'd check out something new and see what was going on."

Convery and a few of his friends looked through the catalog together, impressed with what they saw.

"We're going 'ooo,' 'ahhh,' 'wow,'" he said. "'These women are really incredible.'" So he signed up to receive some addresses, and sent out some letters.

"My original goal was to have fun with it, to correspond with women in another country. Just to add something interesting in my life. So I took another step and signed up to be in this catalog they distribute in Eastern Europe called the Gentleman's Catalog."

Convery sent in a picture of himself, with a bit of information about who he was and what his interests were. He began receiving letters weekly from Russian and Ukrainian would-be brides, forwarded from the Atlanta, Ga.-based European Connections, in one big manila envelope.

Most were in English, Convery said, and all contained pictures. The ones in Russian, though, he wasn't able to read. "I didn't know anyone who spoke Russian at the time, except for the Russian woman who married my lawyer friend," he said.

Veronica's letter and picture were in the first envelope he received.

"[Her letter] said that she was divorced and she was lonely, and she described herself to me and said she was a calm person," he said. "Which, as it turned out, she wasn't. She turned out to be not-calm. And high-maintenance."

They divorced in October 2009, and she remarried in December.

"I might hold that against her for a while," he said. "But in a way, I can understand it."

The mail-order-bride industry is stigmatized, often seen as a last-ditch option for horny old men who can't find women in the United States to love them. There's also a lot of noise on the Web about what motivates men to turn to developing countries for brides: Do they want love, sex, submission? All of those?

An excerpt from Goodwife.com, or The Mail Order Bride Guide, explains: "With many women taking on the 'me first' feminist agenda and the man continuing to take a back seat to her desire for power and control many men are turned off by this and look back to having a more traditional woman as our partner."

So there's definitely some agita surrounding the "modern woman" in play here, and it's unsurprising that many of these marriages end in divorce. There have also been many reported cases of domestic violence, even murder, in these marriages, inciting regulation on the industry all over the world. (It's illegal, for instance, in the Philippines for women to "advertise" themselves for foreign marriages; however, the workaround is that it's not illegal for foreign men to advertise themselves, and they do.) In the past decade there have been laws passed, like the Violence Against Women Act, to protect immigrant women from abusers.

Once an immigrant marries a U.S. citizen, she (or he) is granted a temporary green card, which can be adjusted to a permanent green card after two years. So people jumping into marriages for citizenship have to wait it out for two years if they're hoping to be granted that card. (More on that later.)

As a result, these women are particularly vulnerable to abuse because they're threatened with deportation should they choose to break off the relationship or run away. Retha Fielding, Chief Communications Officer for the National Domestic Violence Hotline, said in a recent interview, "[Citizenship] is used as a weapon. ... The husband says, 'You can't call the police because you'll be deported.'"

There are agencies everywhere offering asylum to immigrants who are victims of domestic violence. The problem is, particularly in the case of mail-order brides, things like language barriers limit access to shelters and make it hard for women to find protective resources. But, because of VAWA, victims are granted a kind of protective status in the U.S. and don't necessarily face deportation. Many women go on to receive green cards despite being divorced from their husbands.

*

That presents a problem for men like Bill Ronan, a 63-year-old Minneapolis man who helped start the Web site Immigrationfraudvictims.com. Ronan claims to be a victim of a mail-order-bride scam, saying his 28-year-old Filipino bride married him only to gain citizenship.

Ronan claims she falsely accused him of abuse in 2007 in order to use the VAWA protections against him and gain citizenship without having to wait those two years. He's headed to Washington, D.C., on Feb. 18 and 19 with the men's rights group Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting (RADAR). (One flyer on the RADAR Web site reads: "[I]t has now become clear that the harmful effects of domestic violence laws far exceed the abuses that occurred in any time since the Jim Crow era.") They're going to protest VAWA, citing violation of civil rights.

"The one crime that people can get away with is false accusations. The police and the judicial system work like dogs that've been sicked on you, but [the accuser] has complete immunity," Ronan said.

A widowed father of a teenaged boy and a Vietnam vet who suffers from exposure to Agent Orange, Ronan was "finding it difficult to find an American woman interested in me, because most women my age don't want to have children and they don't want to come in with somebody who has children. So I looked overseas, where I thought there were good people who took marriage seriously. I ended up in the Philippines and didn't want to spend all this time chasing somebody. I obviously didn't take the time I should have."

Two or three months after Ronan and his wife married, the relationship still hadn't been consummated, and, Ronan said, he approached his wife about it.

"I said, 'I think we need to see a marriage counselor or do something,'" Ronan recalls. "She leaves the house and says, 'I know how to make your life miserable and I'm going to do it.' So she calls the police and the police come by and ask me if I was touching her. I said, "I don't know, I suppose.' I didn't know I was supposed to be defending myself. If they had asked if I had hit her or hurt her or grabbed her, I would have had some idea of what they were talking about."

Ronan said he's been wronged by "the judicial system." He's now an advocate for men's rights and victims of false accusation.

"I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out what this is. We're rewarding criminals. ... It's like a death wish of our country."

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Citizenship marriage fraud actually is a problem. It can be difficult to prove that a marriage is "bona fide," and not fraudulent. And sometimes these sham marriages are consensual, where a U.S. citizen agrees to marry someone to help them acquire citizenship. (If you want to start getting all terror-alerty about the whole thing, USA Today reported in 2006 that "half of 36 foreign-born suspected terrorists who were in the USA from the early 1990s to 2004 gained legal status by marrying Americans — 10 of them through sham marriages.")

Ethan Enzer, who works in the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services field office in Hartford, said he deals a lot with marriage fraud.

"There's a high incidence of marriage fraud in Hartford," Enzer told me. "We deny some dozens of cases a year because of fraud."

And that's only the cases USCIS can find. One woman I talked to, Tabitha (not her real name), lives in Lynn, Mass., with her Kenyan husband, whom she says she married so he could get his green card. But she says she and her husband are in love, which sort of happens sometimes in temporary-seeming green-card marriages. She said she knows many people who've come into marriages this way, mainly with men from Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria.

Legality aside, problems in these marriages frequently center on the blurred lines between the business of a green-card marriage and the ambiguity of the terms of the relationship. Tabitha told me some women she knows who've agreed to "marry for papers" wind up pregnant and devastated when the relationships don't work out, or if they find out their husbands have wives and families in their home countries.

"They end up either pregnant or they assume the marriage is something real. You know what I mean?" she said. "They think, 'I have a fairy tale, I have a husband.' But men come here to make money and go home. They come here because they think America is full of opportunity. They come here to better themselves. Everything they make here they trickle back home to help their families there."

Tabitha told me one of her friends went to Kenya with her husband to visit his family, but "they didn't accept her," she said. "He left her there and she had to go to the U.S. Embassy to get home."

Tabitha is happy with her husband, and said many people find happiness in green-card marriages. While many of them begin or are intended to be citizenship-motivated, she said people do it for companionship, too.

"Old people are afraid of being alone, so they marry for papers just for a companion," she said. "I know an old man who sat there at Yahoo! Answers looking for someone. He found a Spanish woman online and now they're happy together."

Tabitha only knows one couple who almost got caught in their green-card marriage, but they were "stupid about it," she said.

"I have lots of friends doing it, in Lowell, Lynn, Worcester. Worcester's big on it. It's everywhere."

*

What happens if the government suspects you of citizenship marriage fraud? They put you and your partner through intense interviews, asking each of you, separately, the same list of questions (like "Where is the garbage kept in the kitchen?," "How does your spouse take his/her coffee?," "What time do you go to bed?"). If your answers aren't consistent with your partner's and they rule your marriage fraudulent, you get deported and banned from the country for several years, and your sponsor, the U.S. citizen who married you "for the papers," pays all these fines and might even go to jail. It's all really sketchy. And is it fair?

In letters to Sen. Chris Dodd, Loveleen Gill, an Indian immigrant who's been a citizen in the U.S. for over a decade, has been pleading for help in getting USCIS to overturn the ruling that her marriage to Govind Joshi, an Indian immigrant without citizenship, was fraudulent.

The couple married in 2004 and opened an Indian restaurant, India Oven, in West Hartford. It's Joshi's previous marriage that's complicating his case with Gill. That first marriage, to another woman living in Connecticut, was brief; his wife left shortly after they married and Joshi never heard from her again. He filed for divorce. Soon after, he met Gill and married her, but USCIS didn't buy it.

In December 2008, they had a baby, and two months later, Joshi flew home to New Dehli, fearing arrest and deportation. He's been there ever since, while Gill waits to hear the status of her appeal.

"I just wish I knew one way or another," she told me. "But they are saying I just have to wait."

In her letter to Sen. Dodd, she writes, "We notify the immigration department so many times that he left the country but whenever I go for an interview they ask the same question, where is Govind Chandra Joshi, and I don't know what to do."

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Though Rick Convery and Veronica are now divorced, he says the friendship they have is strong.

"It's a great story, until things started to go the wrong way," he said, and if he could go back, he'd do it all over.

He wouldn't try a second time, though: "My thought process is that [another mail-order bride] might be looking to get out of the country or maybe looking for some gold-digging activity or something. ... One young gal came over to be with someone I know, someone really much, much older, like he could've been her grandfather; this guy was in his 60s and she was in her 20s. She stuck around for a couple of months then went off to Brighton Beach, and we don't know where she is now."

Convery, who turns 60 this month, doesn't believe his wife married him just for citizenship. He said they were very much in love, and they had "a good five or six years."

"One thing really neat about being married to her was that [she had] these itineraries," he said. "She'd heard of all these places in the U.S. and she wanted to visit them all. One was Niagara Falls, funny enough, and of course the Statue of Liberty and New York. So I went to a lot of places to bring her that I probably never would've gone to by myself. So that was really fun. We did a lot of stuff together." But in the end, their differences got in the way.

"The culture thing you wouldn't think would be as big of an issue as it is," he said. "But it's there. It's definitely an issue."

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