I do…almost

I’ll start by admitting that I missed the public meeting to discuss the newest bag (sack? carload?) of proposed regulations to stamp out sponsorship marriages. That would have been the appropriate venue for the following diatribe, but I missed it so I’ll vent here.

As I understand it, this crime is perpetrated by a foreign national who pays to marry an indigenous local or other U.S. citizen to gain an Immediate Relative status in order to work here and/or to ultimately get a U.S. green card, enabling them to work in the U.S. mainland.

First, I have a hard time figuring out just who the victims of this dastardly crime are. Is it the local resident who receives a nice fee for just standing in line while a bevy of bureaucrats busily stamps his/her marriage forms and collects the inevitable fees for…something-or-other? Is it the CNMI, which winds up collecting taxes from the then card carrying individual who wants to work here or start a taxpaying business here? Is it the local businesses that might hire this obviously motivated-to-work individual? Is it the potential employees of his/her company who might not otherwise have any job at all? Is the victim the U.S. government who will collect a lifetime of taxes off this poor sap once he arrives in L.A. with his green card in his sweaty little grasp? Is the victim the U.S. Immigration Service? Isn’t our security at stake here? Suppose Osama bin Laden decides to barge in here, marry into a respectable indigenous family, wait a couple of years to get his green card, then move on to St Louis to work his nefarious schemes. Omigod, what an invitation to disaster!! Doesn’t sound too likely though, does it? Even if he shaves off his beard and buys a dandy Hawaiian shirt.

Think about it for a moment. Wouldn’t any self-respecting terrorist just fly to Mexico and walk across the border with the herd of other swarthy individuals headed for the promised land of workshops and welfare? Might not he even dare to (gasp) fake an ID card rather than jump through piles of red tape and spend years of head butting with the Gobbledygook Department to get all his rubber immigration ducks lined up?

Second, just how prevalent is this horrendous, mind-boggling crime? Does it happen twice a year in the CNMI? Twenty times a year? Twenty thousand times a year?

Third, just how much time should we waste, how many of our precious tax dollars should we spend and just how many witch doctors should we employ to shake bones at this imaginary crime?

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) once said, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety—by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” That pretty much sums up this hobgoblin of a topic—imaginary…much ado about nothing…job security for another 50 rubber stamp operators. Doesn’t our hardworking CNMI Immigration Department already has enough to do without imposing this on it? There are plenty of REAL fraudulent nonresident worker schemes to be ferreted out. Let’s have them work on those.

Bruce A. Bateman
Tanapag, Saipan