U.S. is no dream for these brides
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A Ukrainian lawyer, divorced and with a child, turned to the U.S., desperate for a husband and an escape.
A Russian woman wooed by a divorced Seattle man 20 years her senior immigrated here after courting by e-mail for several months.
Anastasia Solovieva King was lured from Kyrgyzstan to Seattle as a teenage mail-order bride with the promise of an education and a better life.
But instead of picket fences and romantic dinners, their lives here were marked by servitude, lies and abuse. King's ended, after two years in America, in death.
The 20-year-old University of Washington student was buried yesterday, more than a month after her body was found in a shallow grave in Marysville. Her husband, Indle King Jr., 39, is in the Snohomish County Jail, charged with perjury and suspected in her death.
King and others are part of a burgeoning Internet industry that links foreign women, desperate to flee dead-end lives, with American men via cyberspace. In 1995, there were 150 Web sites devoted to the business; now there are more than 400.
Thousands of young women, typically aged 18 to 30, put photos and translated mini-profiles on the Web sites, looking for love and hope. Men pick the ones they like; for a fee, the couple gets e-mail addresses and translators.
Thus begins a romantic dance that sometimes ends well, but that critics say is fraught with abuse.
A prospective husband must travel to a woman's country to visit her in person before she can apply for a fiancee visa that allows her to enter the United States. After 90 days here, they must marry or she must leave the country.
"It's not like the man can `order' a bride and she shows up at his doorstep," said John Adams, president of A Foreign Affair, a Phoenix-based international-marriage service.
Adams' company sells everything from addresses to videos. It also specializes in popular marriage tours, taking men on package deals to Russia where they tour the sights by day and meet single women at night.
Critics of the practice say it places young, naive brides, who speak little English and have no money, under the complete control of their husbands. Complaints are met with threats of deportation. If abuse occurs, the women often don't know they have legal rights and are afraid to trust authorities.
"Problems are bound to arise from the unequal nature of the mail-order bride relationship," said Boris Rubinstein, a Seattle-area immigration lawyer. "They both come with unrealistic expectations to the relationship. The women want a prince. The men want a housewife."
The Ukrainian woman is more blunt: "American men who want a woman from the former Soviet Union are looking for slaves. A normal American man doesn't have to look for a wife in Russia."
No reliable statistics
Alarmed by an increase in reports of domestic abuse in mail-order marriages, officials in Washington, D.C., are grappling with the problem.
In 1996, the Senate Judiciary Committee told the Immigration and Naturalization Service to study the unregulated industry and find a way to inform women entering the country on fiancee visas of their rights.
An INS report released in 1999 said there are no reliable statistics of the number of foreign women who become mail-order brides, or who later report abuse.
"We were at a complete loss as to where to get information," an INS official said. "We don't keep track of where fiancees meet each other, whether it's in a bar or through an agency. We have no Richter scale for measuring how happy they are once they get here."
Foreign women, especially those from Third World or Eastern bloc countries, often are unaware that spousal abuse is a crime, experts said. In many cultures, it is tolerated, ignored or even encouraged.
"They believe their entire immigration status depends upon their husband," said Gail Pendleton, associate director of the Immigration Project for the National Lawyers Guild. "All the information they get, they get from their husbands. They don't know they have the right to a lawyer. They don't know they have the right to appear before an immigration judge."
The 1996 Violence Against Women Act allows immigrant women to apply to remain in the U.S. without the sponsorship of their husbands if they can prove they are victims of domestic violence. More than 11,000 women applied for that status between 1997 and 2000, according to INS reports; 6,576 were accepted.
Rubenstein said he gets at least two calls a week from panicked women - many of them mail-order brides from the former Soviet Union, which has become the hot new market for Internet matchmaking.
He tells them they can ask the INS to allow them to stay here on their own, but many women don't have the evidence - medical and police reports - needed to prove abuse. Nor do they have the money or contacts to support themselves.
"They even have a hard time calling me," he said. "They can only talk when their husbands aren't home. Or they can't come to the office because they don't have the money for a bus. You can't do any work if they can't come to the office."
Sometimes all he can do is refer them to the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project.
Pendleton claims the INS has become part of the problem.
"INS officials will often tell these women to sign on the dotted line and go home quietly, that it's better to return to their country and get away from the abuser," she said.
`I believed in him'
The Ukrainian lawyer, who said she feared being identified, said that soon after her picture and profile were posted on the Web, she found an eager match: an American auto-shop manager from the Midwest. They corresponded for a year. The woman invested $1,000 for agency fees, e-mail translations and private English lessons.
Then the man flew to Ukraine, where he romanced her with dinner, wine and stories of the wonderful life in America.
"He was well dressed, caring, and everything seemed great," she said.
They became engaged, and he wired her money so she could quit work. Last spring, he sent the woman and her daughter one-way plane tickets to America.
"I believed in him," said the woman. "Everything I had read and heard about Americans said that they were good people."
But she found herself living in his falling-apart house with broken pipes and no phone. Her husband gave her no money.
When she complained, he threatened to call the police.
"I was in shock," she said. "I cried all the time. He told me that maybe I was a queen back at home, but in America I was nobody."
He refused to pay for her to get a work permit so that she could earn her own money.
The woman eventually returned to Ukraine, to the safety of her family. But she contemplates rejoining her husband, thinking life with him might be better than the poverty she faces at home.
The Russian bride told a similar tale. Soon after her arrival in the Puget Sound area, her marriage became abusive. She had no money of her own and had a hard time finding work. She didn't know that domestic violence was a crime.
She is still with her husband, believing he must sponsor her for her to remain in the U.S.
But, if her situation worsens, she says she will try to go home.
"I'm not one of those girls ... who want to stay here no matter what," she said. "If it gets bad enough, I'll just go back to Moscow."
How? She doesn't know.