Sham Marriages

Sham Marriages

Vu Ngo

Metropolitan State College of Denver
Sociology

Instructor: Sally Stablein

It seems that the United States is the ideal place to come live for a good number of people around the world. So ideal in comparison to their own country that they would go to great lengths and sacrifices to make it to the United States. One of the ways to get into the United States legally is through a legitimate marriage. While an illegitimate marriage is illegal, it is a common occurrence and articles of new sham marriages appear regularly in the media. There are certainly penalties and fines to be paid if these people are found out, but with the number of occurrences speculated, it seems like the cost of the “crime” is outweighed by its benefits. While the reason for the migration varies between the different people, a large percentage of these people are migrating from lower income countries and are seeking a “better” place to build their lives. While a large number of people within the United States may view this as a problem, the cries for immigrants to take responsibility for it are unreasonable. For such a large and worldwide problem, is there a feasible solution to make everyone happy? It may just be that humankind needs to undergo another major phase of evolution.

In 2006 according to the reports by Immigration and Naturalization Service of the United States (INS), of the 300 million people, about 12.1 million are legal immigrants and about 11.6 million are unauthorized immigrants. Of these, 8.4 million are from other North American countries, 1.4 million are from Asia, 1 million are from South America and a little less than another million are from other countries around the world. It’s a small percentage it is still a pretty large number of actual people. These figures do not include the number of people who are staying in the United States without official authorization that are accounted for by the INS reports. The count only increases...

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