Marriage of convenience?

March 5, 2005 12:43 PM

At least from the perspective of US and UK citizenship, is there such a thing as a marriage of convenience any more? Do any AskMeFites have knowledge of the relevant laws, or experience of having been married to people from across the pond?

For some people the "marriage of convenience" appeals not to gain money but to gain the right to live in another country - is this feasible? If so, what's the process? Even if one was to genuinely meet someone from across the Atlantic, fall in love with them and decide to get married, is there any guarantee of either party being able to gain the right to live and work away from home?

posted by skylar to law & government (17 comments total)

I don't know about the US-->UK direction.
In the UK-->US direction:

Marriages of convenience don't count, at least not if they find out. Only "bona fide" marriages.

They check. Ever see Green Card? They're not making it up.

The usual process for most people would be to enter the US on a K1 visa as a fiancee, or through the I130 & K3 process which ends up using similar forms.(1)

As part of getting the K1 or K3, they're going to want to see proof that you've at least met, and they're going to interview the non-American person. If the officer doesn't twig on anything, the interview is pretty short and light, but if they're suspicious they can ask lots of fussy questions about the American -- what's his/her middle name, where are his/her parents from, did you know he/she had been married before, what's the ex's name, when did you meet, why were you there at the time.

Then, once everyone is in the US, the non-American has to file for Adjustment of Status to get a green card (if they don't, it's hasta la vista). There's a similar interview process at the end of that, and they're going to want to see evidence that you've commingled your lives -- joint bank accounts, joint ownership of a house or other major assets, kids together, etc. They can indeed ask you what brands of toothpaste, scent, underwear, your spouse uses if they feel like it. Similar deal to the K1 interview: if you don't give any sign of being not a real couple, it's likely to be quick and painless, but once they smell blood...

So, yeah, you can try to get away with it. But it's not necessarily going to be easy.

(1)If both parties are resident in the UK, it's easier as they can use "Direct Consular Filing" and save a *lot* of time but then the American is already a legal resident (has "leave to remain") in the UK anyhow.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:04 PM on March 5, 2005

You'd have to check this with an expert, but I have been told that there's no automatic right for the spouse of a UK citizen to live in the UK. However, there is an automatic right for the spouse of an EU citizen. So your best bet if you want to live in the UK is to marry someone from another EU country.
posted by Leon at 1:09 PM on March 5, 2005

I only know about spouse coming to the UK, nothing about arriving in the US.

And... I don't know exactly about American spouses/fiancees coming to the UK - but I married a "foreigner" and she got permanent residence after we were married for a year (allows her to live/work here, travel in and out of the UK etc.)

The checks/form filling we had to go through weren't too bad: the UK home office aren't monsters - but they are on the lookout - but then again we had nothing to hide from them - we would have married anyway.

The home office has all the rules etc. and I think you can download forms etc. there.

Actually Leon I think there is an EU Law (or perhaps only UK?) that says basically "the goverment cannot stop a married couple living together" - so they have to come up with a good reason not to allow you to live with your spouse.

Also don't pay anyone to fill forms for you, all the ones I've ever heard of are conmen.
posted by selton at 1:15 PM on March 5, 2005

if one was to genuinely meet someone from across the Atlantic, fall in love with them and decide to get married, is there any guarantee of either party being able to gain the right to live and work away from home

Again, UK-->US only.

Guarantee? No.

There are some barriers in place even to a real in-love no-shit couple, even if everyone agrees that's what they are.

If the UK citizen had been convicted of a "crime of moral turpitude," which boil down to most kinds of serious crimes, they -- at minimum -- face an uphill (and more expensive) battle and might not be able to be admitted to the US at all. Ditto if the UK person has had previous immigration troubles with the US.

If the UK citizen had any of a few spectacularly bad health problems, they wouldn't be able to emigrate to the US. The only thing that comes to mind is ALS -- Lou Gherig's disease. It's untreatable, progressive, and disabling, so the odds of that person going onto public assistance if admitted are basically 100%, so they're not admissible (as an immigrant).

There's a support requirement -- the American has to basically guarantee that the Foreign Person won't go on (some kinds of) public assistance, and needs to have enough income / assets to back that up. This is not normally a big deal; the income line is pretty low, and if you don't meet it yourself you can ask family members to sign on as co-sponsors. But if you were an orphan who was dirt-poor, you'd have trouble importing your sweetie.

Realistically, it's a time-consuming and moderately expensive pain in the ass but that's about it. A real, bona-fide couple with no conviction in anyone's past, etc, doesn't have much to fear from the immigration process. At least not when going from the UK (or Canada or any other OECD country) to the US; things seem to be run a bit more strictly for countries that habitually export mail-order brides. There's never any guarantee, but it's very unlikely that a real couple would be denied except for one of the ostensibly-not-bullshit reasons above (or if they screwed up the forms).
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:19 PM on March 5, 2005

Slightly different - I met my husband in the UK, but he's Australian and I'm American. We decided it would be way easier to go the Australian route, since we didn't even have to get married in that instance. (They have a "defacto" common-law type marriage if you've lived together for a year.) We did, however, have to prove our relationship out the yin-yang. We had bills with both our names on them, photos of us together, boarding passes from joint travel, invitations and letters sent to both of us from friends, joint library cards, statutory declarations from friends and family, etc. (I'd advise that if you're ever planning on applying for such a visa, you start saving that crap now because it took us ages to get it all together.) I was totally expecting the big Greencard scenario and repeatedly quizzed my partner on the color of my toothbrush, etc. In the end our agent just sorta flipped through everything, said we looked like a nice couple, and gave me the stamp. There were other hurdles though - a medical test including a chest X-ray (I don't think Oz wants TB), police background checks, etc. I had to agree that I wouldn't go on the dole for two years. The visa was tentative for the first two years anyway, and if we'd broken up in that time, I could've been denied the right to stay. (Interestingly, there is one exception - if he beat me. Presumably abused mail-order brides get to stay here.)

Anyway, I just wanted to concur with ROU_Xenophobe's statement that a bona-fide couple doesn't have much to worry about from the immigration process. It's expensive and a hassle, but as long as dot all the i's and cross the t's you'll be okay. Of course, I haven't tried to get him into the US yet... which'll be my next hurdle.
posted by web-goddess at 1:45 PM on March 5, 2005

At least from the perspective of US and UK citizenship, is there such a thing as a marriage of convenience any more?

Yes, on the UK side. If you can do enough to get permission to enter the UK as a spouse, and maintain enough of a sham to get past the one-year review, you're pretty much sorted. This is, of course, far from legal, and depends upon your being an excellent liar. It's obviously not recommended, but it'd be naive to say that it doesn't happen. (And I'm guessing that it's that question you want answering.)

A hypothetical situation: consider someone who's gay, and wants to live with his/her foreign partner. An especially generous mutual friend steps in, does the marrying bit, and they all share a house together for the year. Works best in big cities, obviously, and can be a recipe for disaster no matter what.
posted by riviera at 2:03 PM on March 5, 2005

Of course, I haven't tried to get him into the US yet... which'll be my next hurdle.

You've got it easy; you can use DCF in Australia. You file forms directly with one of the consulates, wait a few months and collect information, police check, health check, etc, and then go for an interview, after which your hubby gets an I-551 stamp, the legal equivalent to a green card. Then you move here and you're all set.

It's usually the adjusting-status in the US that's a real pain in the ass and takes forever, but you won't need to do that. If you've been legally married for more than 2 years, he'll enter the US with a full-on no-shit 10-year green card.

Your process will be years quicker than most people's, and at least a few hundred bucks cheaper.'

If you think it's likely that you might move back to Oz anytime in the future, ever, you should think about taking Australian citizenship while you're there (assuming you're eligible). The citizenship process is almost certainly easier than going through the whole being-imported process again after your Aussie permanent-residency expires.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 2:21 PM on March 5, 2005

Related
posted by abcde at 3:57 PM on March 5, 2005

Thanks for that, ROU_Xenophobe. I had no idea it was going to be that simple. I'm bookmarking that for future reference! (And I'm definitely going to get citizenship as soon as I'm eligible in about a year. I figure there's no point in spending all this time here if I don't guarantee being able to come back.)

With regards to the gay issue, the UK might have some sort of visa that covers that. Australia certainly does. I had a nice chat in the pub the other night with an Aussie who brought his American partner here on an "Interdependent Visa". (It's basically exactly the same as the defacto thing we did, but for same-sex couples.) Unfortunately they're thinking of moving back to the US, which means the Australian partner is going nuts trying to find a company to sponsor him for work, since that seems to be the only option.
posted by web-goddess at 9:10 PM on March 5, 2005

Gay couples are fairly easy in plenty of civilized countries. My partner and I have lived in Germany, the UK, and South Africa, me being allowed due to our partnership. We lived in the US first, but he had a student visa (when we met). It rather sucks we could not choose to move to the US based on my citizenship, he'd have to get in via his employment (likely one day, since he works for an American corporate giant).

Funny enough, I thought 'marriage of convenience' was a reference to the high born marrying someone of their station (or for political reasons), while loving someone lower--Or a gay man with a sham straight marriage.
posted by Goofyy at 12:12 AM on March 6, 2005

Let me rush to note that ease is a very relative term when dealing with INS/BCIS/USCIS/whatever they are this week.

Still gonna be a pain in the ass. But like, say, getting a filling instead of root canal, or breaking a toe instead of a leg.

As the time gets closer, hit alt.visa.us.marriage-based on usenet, the kamya visa page, visajourney.com (structured more for K1/K3 people than people who can do DCF, but still useful). Like I imagine moving to Australia was, it's still a fussy, time-consuming, confusing process; these places and the people in them answered a lot of questions for me when I was importing my favorite Torontovite.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 12:13 AM on March 6, 2005

Going US —> to UK:

They seemed a lot more concerned with where we were going to live versus how long of a couple we had been — but we did have piles of emails printed out to show that we were in love and were going to stay together, etc. etc.

(Now that I think about, it'd be dead easy to fake emails with dates like nothing else...)

I don't think the Home Office is as concerned about marriages outside immigrating in as they are about sham marriages occurring in the country.
posted by Katemonkey at 2:07 AM on March 6, 2005

This is all really interesting to me as well... Here's my situation... I am a U.S. Citizen currently living in Ireland since 2002 and wish to to stay here. I have no routes to obtain permanent residence available to me other than to get married, I have exhausted all other avenues. Luckily, I have found a girl who is from the U.K. (London, England) who is living legally in Ireland and has agreed to marry me "on paper" so I can stay in Ireland; at least, that's the goal. How does one go about this? What kind of hurdles are they going to put "us" through? Do we get married here or in the U.K.? Will I only be allowed to work in the U.K. or all of the E.U.? Will I be a citizen or a get some sort of visa status?

One other point... Being an "Irish Citizen" is not as important as becoming an "E.U. Citizen".
posted by Livewire Confusion at 2:52 AM on March 6, 2005

Um, it would be a very bad idea for MeFites to give advice on how to circumvent the immigration laws of any country.
posted by Tholian at 4:30 AM on March 6, 2005

For non-EU citizens: no, the right to stay in a particular EU country doesn't give you the freedom to move, live and work accorded to those with burgundy passports. (And Ireland has been tightening up its citizenship laws for the past five years.)
posted by riviera at 10:56 AM on March 6, 2005

Thanks for all these great answers.

Let's assume I move from the UK and marry a US citizen, for real, and co-habit for three years. Then the US citizen wants to move to the UK (without me.) Is this possible? Do they get rights to live in the UK, or do they have to apply to live in the UK with me?

Also, what happens if we divorce? Do the rights get rescinded?
posted by skylar at 4:30 PM on March 6, 2005

Let's assume I move from the UK and marry a US citizen, for real, and co-habit for three years... Also, what happens if we divorce? Do the rights get rescinded?

After three years? No.

The way marriage-based green cards work is that if you have not been married two years when the green card is issued, you only get a two-year "conditional" green card. At the end of the two years, you send more forms to USCIS trying to convince them that you were really no-shit married and they might want to interview you again. It's not absolutely necessary to still be married at that time -- battered spouses have an instant out, and even people who've just plain gotten divorced can still get the condition removed (with or without the US citizen's say-so) simply by convincing USCIS that they entered into the marriage in good faith.

After 3 years, though, the UK citizen would have a full-on no-holds-barred green card, not dependent on anything or anyone at all (assuming they successfully went through condition-removal). The only negative would be that the UK citizen would have to wait longer to take US citizenship if they wanted it.

Can't help you with the other stuff.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 5:53 PM on March 6, 2005