A few years ago I was on Michael Coren’s TV show in Toronto with a couple of Islamic apologists and Dr. Anis Shorrosh, the no-holds-barred author of Islam Revealed. At one point Dr. Shorrosh brought up marriage fraud, and was promptly silenced by Coren, who was obviously nervous about Canada’s new speech restrictions. Here is a story that supports what Shorrosh was trying to say that night. From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, with thanks to senorasilvermouse and RB:
In 1999, Komal Zaheer married Asim Haroon at the Islamic Foundation in west St. Louis County, an event that she says is preserved in a certificate from the mosque.
The next year, someone filed documents with the government claiming that Asim Haroon’s brother, Ali Haroon, had married Zaheer in Pakistan.
Federal immigration officials say those documents were part of a bogus plan to get a visa for Ali Haroon to live in this country. Zaheer, who told authorities that her husband had threatened to kill her if she revealed the scheme, came forward after he allegedly beat her so badly that she was hospitalized.
Now Asim Haroon, 32, of Wentzville, has been charged in federal court in St. Louis with one count of visa fraud, and in St. Louis County Circuit Court with one count of second-degree domestic assault. His attorney denies the allegations. His brother is being held for deportation proceedings….
Another example from the article:
An Egyptian man, arrested in January on charges that he ran a business from his hot dog cart on Washington streets that provided American brides for Middle Eastern men seeking permanent residency. He arranged at least 100 phony marriages, a criminal complaint said.
A man pleaded guilty last year in California of a marriage fraud conspiracy in which Americans were paid to marry Cambodians so the Cambodians could get immigrant visas to the United States.
Of course, it’s not Cambodians we’re worried about:
Some terrorists have used fraudulent marriages to stay in the United States, according to the nonprofit Center for Immigration Studies. One of them was Fadil Abdelghani, who is serving a 25-year sentence for his role in a 1993 plot to bomb New York landmarks….