|
Immigration Scams:
Are You At Risk?
(this article is
published with authorization of Elena Petrova
author of this article, owner of
Russian
Bride Cyber Guide
By Elena Petrova
Any – and I mean it! – ANY MAN who even remotely considers the
idea of marrying a Russian woman will face the question of
immigration scams. By “facing the question of immigration
scams” I mean worrying about the possibility that a woman will
marry him with the only purpose of gaining residence to his
country, and will divorce him soon after the marriage.
How grounded is this worry? General
opinion is that the danger of an immigration scam is high in
marriages with foreign women. Try to share the idea of finding a
marriage partner abroad with your family and friends, and everyone
will think you are nuts and are setting yourself up to become an
immigration vehicle for a cunning Russian girl.
Is it true that there are many
Russian women that will marry a man only for the purpose of
immigration? Why does such an opinion persist among the general
public? How common are immigration scams in marriages with Russian
women?
First of all, let’s find out
where one gets all those ideas about scams in marriages with
foreign women. Did you have any friends, family members or
colleagues that married Russian women and fell victims of
immigration scams? Most likely, NO! So your ideas about high
probability of immigration scams in marriages with foreign women
are, most often, based on what you have read, heard or seen in the
Media – and of course you know what makes the news and what’s not:
When was the last time you have seen a “happily ever after” fairy
tale on the front page of a newspaper? Scandals, murders, and
scams make the news; happy marriages don’t. In the USA alone it’s
about four to six thousand men that marry foreign women every
year; how many scandal stories you hear for the same period of
time? Apparently, if immigration scams in marriages with foreign
women were indeed such a problem, you would have heard horror
stories much more often, and, eventually, your government would do
something about it.
In fact, it is
NOT so many Russian women that seek
somebody abroad with the only purpose to use marriage as the means
to immigrate to the USA or any other country. It is only women
who are absolutely desperate that would contemplate such a
marriage, and those women are seldom objects of desire for any
man.
A woman that is desired by a
foreign man is usually a woman who can exercise some choice among
her suitors, and she would rather select a mate who is suitable
for her than just marry anybody: once she is in a foreign country,
and divorced from her husband, what will she do? Live a lonely
life of an immigrant - a person of “second sort”, struggling to
make ends meet, without any connections, family and friends,
having to look for a new love partner - does this prospective
looks any brighter to you than a prospective of having a loving
happy marriage and stable life? Apparently, finding a suitable
mate will take much less time for a woman in Russia than the
process of going through marriage to an unsuitable mate, following
immigration and divorce, and settling in her new single life. Do
you think Russian women are all crazy masochists? Any reasonable
human being would prefer to receive “the full package” including
love and stability, without the need to go through unnecessary
pain and change. It is simply unrealistic to think many Russian
women would prefer to contemplate an immigration scam, i.e.
marrying a man with the only purpose of immigration and subsequent
divorce, rather than marrying for love and receiving “the full
package”. All human beings are made in the same way: we all want
to be happy and do not want to suffer. Russian women are no
different.
So the cases of real immigration
scams should be rare among Russian women marrying foreign men,
I mean the cases where women initially intended to divorce their
husbands after the immigration, before even being married to them.
Try to picture yourself in a relationship with somebody you don’t
like, and spending 1-2-3 years of your life in such a situation,
would you willingly select such a fate, when you could be involved
with somebody you really like and receive the same benefits? This
is why I say that it is only a desperate person who would decide
on an immigration scam, the person who cannot exercise any choice.
And the reason why she does not have any choice is because no one
wants her. So, by selecting an attractive woman to start a
relationship with and competing for their attention with other
suitors, men in a great extent secure themselves against desperate
persons. Therefore, the explicit type of immigration scams where a
person starts a relationship with somebody only to gain permanent
residence to a western country is not that common in marriages
with Russian women.
But if people do not know each
other well enough, problems in a marriage can occur, and in
such a case men often feel they were just "used" for the purpose
of immigration. The initial intent of a woman was not an
immigration scam but if the couple do not stay together for long,
a man may decide he was “scammed”.
For example, if a man marries a
local woman and their marriage doesn't work out, and they discover
their interests or pace of life are incompatible, and divorce
soon, the man would not think he was "scammed", just because a
woman would not gain anything from such a marriage, rather lose,
just like him.
But if such a thing happens in a
marriage of a local man and a foreign woman, the woman appears to
have gained something she did not have before the marriage - the
residence to a western country, which is perceived as very
desirable for foreigners - and therefore a man can conclude he
fell a victim of an "immigration scam".
It is the belief that life in
Russia is a complete misery and there is nothing for women to lose
when they immigrate, that drives people to think that a Russian
woman would go to any lengths just to gain residence into
countries of Northern America, Australia or Western Europe.
This perception is nothing but a myth. Russian people do not
consider their life miserable, and most of them would not
contemplate immigration by any means, even the people who are well
traveled and perfectly aware of the differences in the life style
between Russia and the west. The real reason why so many Russian
women advertise for partners abroad is not their desire to
immigrate but their inability to find a suitable partner in
Russia, mainly caused by demographic discrepancies (according to
the latest census, there are 10 million more women than men in
Russia).
Talking about scams, in reality,
it is nearly impossible to fake attraction to a mate that will be
convincing enough for a possible husband to proceed with marriage.
There are very clear indications if the person is or is not
attracted to a potential mate, such as sexual attraction (in the
case where a woman fakes attraction, she prefers to have as little
sexual communication as possible), personal acceptance (if a woman
fakes attraction, she is often irritated with minor things), and
body language (if a woman fakes attraction, she tries to "close"
herself to the man, by crossing her hands and legs when the two
are together, making herself "inaccessible" for him, moving back
when he moves towards her, etc). Such cues in a woman's behavior
can seldom go unnoticed by a man, even if on the subconscious
level, he will have the feeling that "something's not right", and
will usually back up from a marriage.
What happens in reality most often
is that when two people who do not know each other well decide to
marry, they might, at a later stage, discover some personal
incompatibilities, such as hygienic or sexual
incompatibilities, which can be the most repulsive, or less
stressful but nevertheless important in a marriage differences in
educational or cultural level, pace of life, circle of social
interaction, etc. For example, for a woman who lived all her life
in a large city and was attending theatrical or musical
performances on a weekly to monthly basis, the fact that her
husband lives in a small town and never attends live performances
can be significant enough to feel inadequate in a marriage, if
these cultural activities were important for her.
Therefore, it is extremely
important to know each other's daily routine, background and
interests in great detail before deciding on marriage.
Other important things will be the
person's reactions in critical situations; for example, one
person is used to solving problems through an immediate discussion
in raised voices, and the other is used to backing up if a problem
arises and removing himself from the situation altogether. With
the time, such modus operandi are likely to cause repulsive
feelings in both, unless the couple discuss their way of handling
problems and find a mutually acceptable way of solving the
problems - which is highly unlikely, since people seldom realize
their differences on the behavioral level and the very fact that
another person might have a different set of behavioral patterns,
since our own behavioral patterns seem "natural" to us and we
cannot even imagine they might be "unnatural" for somebody else.
In real life such incompatibilities
are checked in a natural way, and couples that do not have
compatible behavioral patterns seldom get to the stage of marriage
decisions. In the long distance dating, couples prefer to
concentrate on their common points and overlook their differences,
or possible differences, and a couple can be forced into a
marriage decision before they are actually ready to approach such
a decision.
The only remedy to a potential
"immigration scam" situation is to take the time and effort to
really get to know the person you are intending to marry. What
is especially important for men, they should disclose as much
personal information as possible to a potential partner, since it
will be the woman who moves to an unknown country and needs to
adjust to the new life style. Daily routine, earnings and
expenses, entertainment, hobbies, health problems, desire for
children and how soon such a desire can be fulfilled, should be
discussed in detail. If those aspects were not discussed in
advance, there is a great risk for a marriage to survive, should
significant incompatibilities be discovered later in a marriage.
Yours,
Elena Petrova
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR: Elena Petrova is well known in the
Russian dating industry by her website
Russian
Brides Cyber Guide,
which is an informational source about Russia and
Russian women. She holds master’s degree in
philosophy and authored several highly successful
books about Internet dating.
|
|
