The Department of Homeland Security has managed to issue a press release on immigration-related marriage fraud without mentioning the words “alien”, “marriage”, or “immigration”.
The lede of the release states:
As part of ongoing efforts to combat cyber crimes and online financial fraud, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) launched an awareness campaign [on Valentine’s Day] to educate the public on dangers associated with online romance scams and how individuals can protect themselves and loved ones.
One of the principal frauds in this general area is when an alien, often illegally in this country, seeks to marry a citizen in order to secure legal status as represented by a green card. Once the citizen has signed all the immigration forms, and has promised to financially support the alien, that alien then dumps the citizen and often files papers charging — fraudulently in many if not most cases — abuse on the part of the citizen.
In most of these cases the alien then “self-petitions” for a green card, and in most of them the alien gets his or her way — often without Homeland Security telling the citizen what happened. This is a sad pattern, with the alien usually more attractive than the citizen, often younger than the citizen, and more worldly and clever than the citizen. And then we at the Center for Immigration Studies hear from the heart-broken and often financially devastated American.
One of our recent cases, for example, involved a younger, good-looking woman from Colombia marrying — and then dumping — an older, 100 percent disabled veteran of the war in Iraq, a soldier who suffered severe brain injuries when a rocket hit his Humvee. CIS has published a collection of such stories. In several other cases, straight American women (some wanting a baby) find themselves married to gay alien males.
Does the DHS warning mention the legal-status-through-marriage phenomenon? Not a whisper.
Some of the fraud that aliens seek (often successfully) to impose on citizens does not relate to immigration matters, it relates only to money. But if you are writing about this kind of fraud, why not discuss fraud that involves money and citizenship, as opposed to money alone?
DHS, however, in an effort to distribute a warning, has tried to do so without alienating any alien. Apparently with this motivation in mind, the department has failed, in its list of tips, to even mention the fact that these pitches are generally delivered in broken (or severely abused) English.
Above all, let’s make sure that we are politically correct when it comes to warnings against alien criminal behavior.