November 24 2006
No to foreign brides: Feminism meets fascism

In an echo of Hitler's 1935 Racial Purity Law, which forbade sex between Germans and Jews, feminist TV host and columnist, Bonnie Erbe, is calling for a ban on American men taking foreign brides.
Realising that the term "racially inferior" can't be used these days, Erbe justifies her extreme views by labelling foreign brides as "less well educated" and poses the question "Do we really want another 40,000 plus people entering the United States per year?"
She also accuses their American husbands of "unimaginable abuse."
Her rant is entitled "A rare moment of sanity out of the Bush administration."
Let's not just make it tougher for American men to hook up with "mail order brides" over the Internet and import them, let's ban the practice altogether.
In one of the more laudable acts of his tenure in the White House, President Bush earlier this year signed into law the "International Marriage Broker Regulation Act of 2005" or IMBRA. The law imposes some tough restrictions on men seeking to import wives. Some of the men complain the law presumes all such American men are abusers.
Because it does.
But I say the mere act (to wit, the bizarre act) of deciding to marry someone from a foreign country who is just about guaranteed to be less well educated and a lot less well off financially, creates such an incurably unhealthy imbalance of power in the union, even horrifically burdensome regulation won't suffice.
The law requires before any foreign woman's contact information is sold (by an Internet marriage broker) to an American man, he must disclose his criminal and marital background. It also requires the agency brokering such relationships to obtain the man's record from the National Sex Offenders Public Registry database, translate it into the woman's native language and give her a copy.
These are the disclosure requirements that even Ms Erbe describes as "horrifically burdensome."
- Every state of residence since the age of 18;
- Current or previous marriages as well as how and when they terminated;
- Information on children under 18;
- Any arrest or conviction related to controlled substances, alcohol or prostitution, making no distinction on arrests not leading to conviction;
- Any court orders, including temporary restraining orders (which are notoriously easy to obtain);
- Any arrest or conviction for crimes ranging from "homicide" to "child neglect";
- Any arrest or conviction for "similar activity in violation of Federal, State or local criminal law" (without specifying what "similar" means).
The one thing that both supporters and opponents of the IMBRA bill can agree on is that these rules weren't drawn up to regulate foreign dating sites. They are intended to drive them out of business.
The bill's feminist proponents had it enacted through trickery.
It was sneakily appended to the uncontroversial Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act of 2005 and passed by an undemocratic "voice vote" by the Senate on Friday, December 16 and the House on Saturday, December 17, when lawmakers were impatient to return home for the holidays. No hearings or witness testimony took place.
An Internet search for the words, "mail order brides abuses" brings up articles entitled, "A license to Abuse" and "Mail Order Misery" among many others. Tales of brutalized and murdered women are legion. The situation is not new, although the Internet is clearly increasing opportunities for men to find developing nation wives (very few so-called mail order marriages if any are between American men and women from other developed nations.)
The New York Times reports, "In 1998, fewer than 2,500 foreign women applied to become permanent residents under the Violence Against Women Act (of which IMBRA is a part) which allows abused wives to apply for residence without the support of their husbands. In the fiscal year that ended in September, 9,500 applied." That's a 400 percent increase in six years. The paper quotes the INS saying some 37,500 women entered the country last year on fiancee visas or temporary visas for spouses of American citizens - up 50 percent from three years before.
Of course, the "400 percent increase in six years" that Ms Erbe refers to has little or nothing to do with violence against foreign women and has everything to do with the increasing incidence of marriage fraud against American men.
In order to get a house, an income, a Green Card and residency in the Promised Land, all a foreign con-girl has to do is to marry a hapless American victim and then falsely accuse him of knocking her around.
A well-trained army of lawyers and social workers will then spring into action to make her rich beyond her wildest dreams at the unfortunate guy's expense (See Ning from Nong Khai wins divorce lottery)
With so much to gain and without even the slightest risk of being prosecuted for perjury, a woman would have to be a saint to tell the truth in these circumstances.
A 1993 Yale Law Journal article described several cases of unimaginable abuse including the tale of one Maria who came to the United States from the Dominican Republican to marry a man who began brutalizing her shortly after they married.
"I had eight stitches in my head and a gash on the other side of my head, and he broke my ribs... He would bash my head against the wall while we had sex. He kept threatening to kill me if I told the doctor what happened."
Of course, Ms Erbe's anecdotal claims of widespread "unimaginable abuse" are based on feminist dogma rather than research. No such evidence exists and many commentators believe that the incidence of abuse against foreign brides is, in fact, lower than against American brides. The divorce rate is said to be considerably lower too.
Unpleasant anecdotes don't prove anything.
In the bizarre world of Bonnie Erbe, the following ditty would be all the proof you needed to enact legislation preventing American women from visiting their parents.
Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.
Who pays these women's health care bills when their husbands beat and abandon them? Most likely, the American taxpayer.
Had Ms Erbe made even the most cursory attempt to research this issue she'd have discovered that, before any visa is granted, American husbands are compelled to sign a legally binding agreement to pay their foreign bride's health care bills and any other expenses that might otherwise fall on the state.
I don't assume all such marriages end badly. Perhaps many last long and end blissfully "until death doth them part." That aside, it still seems a bizarre and unappealing choice for an American man to set out to marry a woman on the basis of a preconceived notion that she emanates from a submissive culture. And submissiveness is key, as the men portrayed in the Times article make clear.
"'It all started with women's lib', said Sam Smith, a former salesman of insurance and mutual funds, who founded I Love Latins in Houston six years ago. 'Guys are sick and tired of the North American me, me, me attitude.'"
Like most American women, Erbe dismisses a wife who acts in an openly kind or caring way towards her husband as a "submissive" doormat. No wonder the divorce rate is going through the roof.
If these women get outsourced, they only have themselves to blame.
Two thoughts in closing. We are already a nation divided on mass immigration with polls showing more and more Americans want limits to the number of foreigners granted citizenship. Do we really want another 40,000 plus people entering the United States per year to satisfy men who cannot seem to find suitable mates among America's already copious supply?
Erbe's closing thoughts strip away any pretence that she's trying to protect her foreign "sistas." She's just a garden-variety racist and man-hater.
And, if the mail order marriage industry is so great for women, then why aren't American women flocking to the Internet to find foreign husbands?
American women who travel widely will already be aware that foreign men treat them with polite disinterest because it's generally assumed that they share the same extremist views as Bonnie Erbe (except in sexually repressed Muslim countries where popular culture portrays American women as sex-crazed nymphomaniacs who outperform goats in every conceivable way).
This is one growing phenomenon that our government ought not to endorse.
I beg to differ.
Original article
(Spotted by Grunt)
[Posted to Relationships by David]
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