International Marriage Broker Regulation Act
The K-1 visa has been associated with the mail-order bride phenomenon. Many K-1 visa immigrants are from third world or economically depressed countries. Some have argued that both mail order brides and their American petitioners both hold false expectations – the bride imagining life with a wealthy foreign husband and the bridegroom dreaming of a loyal wife who overlooks obvious differences in age or other faults.
Partly in response to this Congress passed the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act in 2005. The act requires that fiancées be given a brochure about domestic violence, and requires that American petitioners who have been convicted of certain crimes of violence, abuse or multiple crimes involving drugs declare this on the petition, among other things. If two or more K-1 visa petitions were filed at any time in the past or if a petitioner previously had a K-1 visa petition approved within two years prior to the filing of another petition, the petitioner must apply for a waiver. To request a waiver a written request must be submitted with the new petition accompanied by documentation of the claim to the waiver.
Additionally, under the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, any person convicted of a felony sex crime involving children is ineligible to petition a foreigner to immigrate to the United States, including on a K-1 visa. The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security can issue a waiver of this Act at his sole discretion.
Read more about this topic: K-1 Visa
Famous quotes containing the words marriage, regulation and/or act:
“A marriage based on full confidence, based on complete and unqualified frankness on both sides; they are not keeping anything back; there’s no deception underneath it all. If I might so put it, it’s an agreement for the mutual forgiveness of sin.”
—Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906)
“Lots of white people think black people are stupid. They are stupid themselves for thinking so, but regulation will not make them smarter.”
—Stephen Carter (b. 1954)
“I wish my countrymen to consider that whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it. A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length even become the laughing-stock of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)