Designer bags were last season's accessory must-have. Designer babies may be the genetically enhanced status symbol of tomorrow. Designer wives, however, are available for order today-taxes nonapplicable-as willing participants in the mail-order bride industry.
Over 100,000 women around the world are listed on the Internet as available for marriage to Western men; one site alone, A Foreign Affair, lists nearly 30,000. And while governments find it difficult to keep exact tallies - the fact that he found his wife at The Mail-Order Bride Warehouse isn't something a husband tends to advertise - approximately 4,000 to 6,000 North American men find wives online through "international marriage brokers" each year. A visit to Web sites with names like Goodwife.com, A Special Lady and Latin Love offers insight as to why the industry is thriving.
Each Web site advertises feminine characteristics of potential spouses that seem paradoxical, emphasizing both the "traditional values" and "exotic sex appeal" of women from Thailand, Russia, the Philippines and Peru. These sites cater to men looking for the ideal wife: a submissive creature with dinner on the table at 6 p.m. sharp and a sex kitten in the bedroom. According to a US Immigration report, most men who seek out potential mates through IMBs have achieved an above-average level of education and are ideologically conservative.
While matches arranged through IMBs represent a tiny percentage of the millions of marriages that are recorded each year in North America, the US felt it necessary to pass the International Marriage Act in June. The controversial law regulates IMBs who profit by acting as matchmakers for their predominantly white and middle-aged male clients, requiring companies to provide immigration information to women in their native language and ordering men to fill out criminal history questionnaires. The new law does not purport to stop mail-order bride marriages, which are legal in the US, but it does provide some protection to foreign women who often have little knowledge of the English language and few contacts in North America apart form their new husbands.
Like the US, Canada does not prohibit men from sponsoring women they meet through "international correspondence services." Immigration Canada can only determine whether a relationship looks genuine or not. According to Rebecca Vernik, an assistant who works for a Westmount law firm specializing in immigration, "Immigration Canada doesn't care why you are getting married as long as you are coming to Canada to be with your partner. It is not the love police or the moral police."
Governments may be able legislate the circumstances under which their residents can enter into holy matrimony. However, whether men and women choose their mates in pursuit of love, control or simply a better standard of living is a decision that, for better or worse, cannot be decreed by law.
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