How Hard Is It to Commit Marriage Fraud, Really?

Marriage fraud is when two people, who are not a couple, get married just so one of them can get legal status: what’s often called getting married for papers. In 2014 an immigration and customs official estimated that between 5-15% of marriage visas go to sham marriages. That means that there are potentially tens of thousands of fake marriages a year. In order to get a marriage visa, you need to be able to pass what’s called the marriage fraud interview. Here at Latino USA, we became curious about how difficult the interview actually is. So we set up a fake interview in which an immigration lawyer, Allan Wernick, would try to guess what marriages were real and which ones were fake.