Circa 2000 - and you may need the source website to find the links (
http://www.american.edu/ted/bride.htm). Note, some of the links are stale and unworking.
A few notable quotations from the paper - some interesting, some offensive, most misleading - but here they are:
At the moment, the only country that has legislation against mail-order brides is the Philippines where the mail-order bride industry has been outlawed.45 This was due to the extremely active sex-trade and trafficking of women.
As stated previously, there is very little data available on the number of Russian mail-order bride marriages that occur annually or how many of them last. The INS estimates that 2,000 to 5,000 mail order marriages occur annually.46 According to my calculations, that is an average of 3500 marriages a year. For 1997, 21% of all immigrants were spouses of US citizens. A substantial majority of these immigrants were women. Since there is little official data available, the INS, using the figure of 2000-5000 marriages a year, calculates that 1.5% to 2.7% of the 132,000 female spouses entering the US are mail-order brides. 47
The concept of the mail-order bride raises a holw host of issues regarding the definitions of love, marriage, modern femininity, women's rights and economics. Can two strangers really fall in love and make a lasting commitment based on correspondence and a few meetings- especially when all of this occurs through the medium of an interpreter? Romantic literature would say yes iterature would say yes especially with the medieval tradition of courtly love from afar. How viable is a marriage when one of the partner’s main desires is to flee poverty? Are American men just lonely or are these men looking for someone to dominate and assume conventional female roles? Is there something really wrong with American women? Are Russian women sincerely looking for love or for a provider to support them and their children- a provider that they will cause lasting emotional harm when they desert them as soon as INS regulations allow? Both parties leave themselves extremely vulnerable in this process. Yes, there are happy endings and glowing testimonials; but there are also the battered wives and abandoned men. Is the mail-order bride industry just exploiting the hopes and dreams of lonely people, or are they honestly concerned with compatibility and bringing two people together? The human heart can be fragile. It is difficult to reconcile abstract concepts such as desire for love and happiness with a monetary amount that can be set arbitrarily by agencies.
In theory, legislation can end this industry by banning mail-order agencies all together as in the case of the Philippines. However this might not be effective. In the US there are thousands of dating services or agencies dedicated to just introducing people to each other (no mention is necessarily made of marriage). Existing agencies could alter their format and just market themselves as pen-pal clubs (which many of them already do) or dating services. Despite changes, there is little chance that ingrained Russian cultural ideas concerning the roles of women and marriage will change quickly. Russian women will still want husbands and American men will still want wives. The INS cannot discriminate how a couple meets – it can only look for fraud or abuse. However it and the federal government can make it cost prohibitive to marry a mail-order bride and cause a decrease in the industry.
24. Substitutes:
Yes, there are alternative substitutes to mail-order bride agencies. Men and women can look for spouses in their respective countries through conventional means. Through the internet, men and women from different nations can correspond through chat rooms, bulletin boards and newsgroups. If they still feel the need to have someone help them, friends, family and the time-honored community yente are usually more than happy to arrange introductions without monetary compensation.
As stated previously, the potential bride and groom are vulnerable in this process. Yes there are cases that end happily. However the bride is vulnerable to abuse when arriving in her new country and while dependent on her new husband. The groom is vulnerable to financial ruin and emotional trauma if his bride abandons him or sues him for divorce. There are no guidelines governing the behavior of agencies or compensation for unsatisfied customers.
Enjoy !
- Dan
