[Moderating]
That’ll be a Warning for political potshots.
Yep. I deserved it. Lost my head there for a minute.
Should point out that recently in the news were people from Haiti who tried a variant of that, which earned them a free trip back to Haiti. The “number” they give you when you arrive is to appear for a hearing as to why you are in danger of life and limb where you currently live. If you can prove it to the tribunal’s satisfaction, you get a temporary stay. If not, off you go, likely with a permanent ban on entering the USA.
Of course, that’s easier to prove if you come from a place where normal citizens are regular victims of extortion, murder, and other gang violence with minimal checks by the local government. It was a bit harder to prove for Haitians settled in Chile or Mexico for the last 10 years. It will be even harder for someone from a fairly peaceful and lawful country like Canada or Germany to succeed.
Should point out Canada had a flood of Haitians leaving the USA a few years ago, claiming refugee status under the similarly mistaken impression they could stay permanently. It could take a few years but the odds are many of those persons will be getting sent home - and not back to the USA. Courts in both Canada and the USA are woefully backed up, but they work eventually.
[Moderating]
The post you’re responding to was off-topic, and thus so is your post. If you wish to discuss this further, take it to another thread, probably in GD.
Apologies - to follow up OP, I just wanted to point out that whatever clever method someone may have thought up or read about on the internet - INS is not stupid, they’ve been doing their job for decades, and they have seen and analyzed every scam. Whether it’s green card, claiming refugee, anchor baby or any other “clever” idea -
(a) it doesn’t work the way you think it does
(b) they’ve though of it too and they have ways of detecting and stopping that loophole
(c) as a result, there are legal consequences should they investigate.
So my earlier advice stands - don’t even try or agree help someone evade immigration law, unless you can afford a lot of lawyers. At least a foreigner may get away with no worse than simply being sent home. If you are a citizen you may become an object lesson to others.
This does not logically follow. The only way this would make sense would be if the bottom line is that very few people are successful in illegally entering the US. But that is far from the case.
So whatever amount of experience the INS has and however smart they are, it’s obviously not enough to stop quite a lot of people. So you can’t merely cite these factors in claiming that any particular scheme is unlikely to work.
Every popular scam will have intelligent professionals who have “seen and analyzed” it. Whether those professionals are generally successful in combatting it will depend on other factors.
I think md-2000 was talking about trying to fool INS (really, ICE, right?) into thinking your sham marriage is not a sham, not claiming that people can’t cross the border illegally.
ETA: not your shame marriage, of course.
That’s true, but the same logic applies.
It does not follow from the mere fact that INS is intelligent and experienced that they are successful. You need actual evidence that they are successful at their task before deducing that scams are unlikely to work. As long as there are millions of illegal immigrants here, then the evidence is that they are unsuccessful despite their intelligence and experience, and there’s no reason to assume that any particular scam is not effective.
There’s no reason to assume that the fact that ICE is unable to prevent illegal immigration has anything to do with the ability of USCIS to detect fraudulent visa/green card applications based on sham marriages. They are two different agencies with different responsibilities.
But, they’re fundamentally different tasks. The number of people trying to use a sham marriage in order to stay in the country past their visa expiration is going to be a tiny, tiny fraction of the people trying to cross the border. Plus, the people at ICE trying to stop people from crossing the border are not the same people who are trying to sniff out sham marriages.
ETA: If they are actually different agencies, then the undocumented immigrants really have nothing to do with the Band Names.
Excellent band name.
Speculating here, but I expect the vast majority of people who are in the US illegally are here because they either entered illegally, or entered legally and then quietly let their visa expire. These people generally don’t pop up on USCIS radar unless they somehow make contact with law enforcement, e.g. a traffic violation, workplace raid, or some sort of crime/misdemeanor. In contrast, a marriage-based green card application features a couple who are formally presenting themselves to the USCIS and asking for their review and approval. Limited success in one enforcement category does not automatically infer limited success in another enforcement category.
The USCIS success rate in ferreting out sham marriages would be impossible to determine unless all of the couples who successfully evaded detection later came out five years later and admitted, on the record, that their marriage was a sham. It’s not like shoplifting, where you can document how many dollars of loss were stopped at the door and how many dollars of loss weren’t. Without any clear evidence on way or the other regarding USCIS success rates, there are still reasons to assume that the scam has a low success rate. The first reason is that yes, the USCIS has studied this for decades and knows what kind of tricks people try to pull, and how to best combat them. They’ve been studying the problem a lot longer than any given couple has. The second reason is that any other assumption is dangerous: a bit like agent detection, the idea is that any error you make should be one that probably leads to a safe outcome. You should assume the USCIS is effective because to assume otherwise (and proceed with a sham marriage) can wreck your life.
The logic is being lost here.
I’m not saying “the fact that so many people are in the country illegally proves that the immigration authorities can’t get the job done”. Were I saying that, then you (& others) would be making an on point response. But that’s not what I’ve said.
What I am saying is that “so many people being in the country illegally proves that the fact that immigration authorities are intelligent and experienced is not in and of itself a proof that such-and-such random scam is not going to work”.
It may be that this particular approach lends itself to verification by the authorities and that this type of scam won’t work. And it may be that this particular type of scam does not lend itself to verification by authorities and will work. But either way, you can’t establish that it won’t work merely by claiming that “INS is not stupid, they’ve been doing their job for decades, and they have seen and analyzed every scam”, since that in and of itself is not a conclusive proof that they will successful at their task, as evidenced by their failure in other areas. That’s all.
Yes, the issue is that you only have to mess up one thing for the INS to detect the problem. Everyone knows the alleged requirements for a green card marriage - indeed I wonder if one of the items on the INS checklist is “this couple is too well prepared…”?
I suspect too the INS is more out to stop people who do green card marriages for money, rather than friends who decide to help someone they know well enough to care to do something.
The distinction and relative success between people who sneak across the border undetected vs, those who file a refugee claim on entry is a separate topic - as Chronos says - outside the topic of this thread.
And yet, we have multiple people in this thread describing real-world instances of successful green-card marriages. So clearly it is possible.
Just a wild guess, but a stranger’s “green card marriage for money” is probably easier to detect and gives more clues than “we met because we are in the same social circle” which would describe a lot of the friends-of-convenience marriages.
I’d second that, knowing two successful green card marriages–they were between people who knew each other socially and didn’t appear to be unlikely matches.