... in response to Dictatorship alert., posted by Nathan on Jan 30, 2002One of the things agencies are currently required to do by regulation (at least those operating in the US) is to inform the lady of her rights and responsibilities regarding immigration translated into her native language. It describes her right to stay here under an abuse clause of she gets into an abusive relationship, and the penalties for immigration fraud. We're also required to tell her that international matchmaking companies are unregulated. Seems a bit strange that there's a regulation requiring us to tell the female clients that we're unregulated, but true. There's a $20,000 per incident fine for non-compliance, which would destroy someone financially for life with only a few ladies in the agency who were not informed.
I actually think it's a good thing to inform the ladies, but the obvious intention of the regulation was to go after the agencies. If the goal was to make sure that the ladies are informed, it would be distributed to any woman entering the country on a fiancee or spousal visa by the INS. That's the only way to be sure that they're all informed since there's many agencies operated by foreigners outside US jurisdiction. They are not operating under US law and there's no requirement that they inform the ladies of anything. The real intent was to go after agencies in my opinion.
I think this new proposal was talked about a few years ago and was a recommendation. I believe it was mentioned somewhere in the voluminous report to Congress (published here, you can see it by clicking on "INS Report" off the main message board page.)
I believe the intent of the regulations has been, and will continue to be, targeted towards eliminating the industry. For those who operate free-lance without an agency, there will be no problems, but for anyone who relies on agencies to get them in contact with ladies interested in meeting Western men, they may have to go through only foreign owned agencies who are exempt from all these regulations in the future. If the regulations succeed in putting US owned companies out of business it will have exactly the opposite effect of what they claim the intent is since the ladies will most likely either come through foreign owned agencies exempt from these regulations, or marry men who met them without the assistance of an agency.
If they really wanted to protect the ladies, these things should be done by the INS for ALL women entering the country through marriage. They could make the man financially responsible for obtaining a background check and translating it. The costs to generate the informational documents informing the ladies of their rights and responsibilities under immigration law would be small and would only add perhaps two more sheets of paper to an already large stack of paper work. It would have virtually no financial impact on the INS. Neither would background checks that had to be paid for by the person sponsering the lady. But of course, protecting the ladies is not the real intent. The real intent is to make what many percieve as disgusting servitude based marriages from happening.
I doubt that Washington State can get this enacted since immigration is controlled by the federal government, but there will undoubtably be other attacks made on "MOB" marriages.
