Detecting more and more fake marriages in the Chinese community, the U.S. government has tightened its screening of marriage-based green card applications filed by Chinese immigrants.

According to Norman Wong, an immigration lawyer, U.S. embassy officials in Guangzho, China conducted a survey in Taisan, Fujo and its nearby suburbs – the areas where the most marriage applicants came from. The survey is to assess the validity of prior divorce cases. Wong added that the survey revealed that about 80 percent of divorce cases are suspected to be bogus – the purpose of the divorce is to make them eligible to marry a U.S. citizen and then, once in the United States, to remarry their spouses, the lawyers added. Many Chinese applicants have learned to avoid New York State, where the processing is more stringent and opt for southern and southeastern states.

Investigators working for the U.S. embassy went to local villages and chatted casually with people about so and so’s marriage situations. Sometimes they went directly to the families of reported divorcees to see if they still lived together. In other cases, they even looked inside the closets to get an idea of the people living in the household, or called the family and asked children if both their parents still lived together.

Wong said that even immigration status change based on marriage is examined very carefully by immigration authorities. Besides double checking all documents before an interview, it is very common now that spouses have to go through separate interviews. Each would have to answer 30 questions. With three inconsistent answers, the application could be rejected.

John Yong, another immigration lawyer, said that nowadays, anyone caught in bogus marriage schemes will be charged with fraud and face five to 10 years imprisonment. Upon serving the sentence, people without green cards or legal status will be deported. Yong also said that since more and more African and Latino Americans are enlisted into the marriage schemes, some Chinese applicants have been told to file their papers in southeastern states like South Carolina or Georgia, where there are large concentrations of African and Latinos and the immigration scrutiny is more relaxed.

In recent years, large-scale crackdowns on bogus marriages are conducted almost every year. Chen Shun, an owner of an agency that helped processing fake marriage cases was sentenced on June 3, 2005 and convicted of assisting and arranging green card fraud and sentenced to three years of probation and a $15,000 fine.

Coincidently, Huang Gang Xiong, another immigration agent sentenced to 27 to 37 years of prison, was discovered to have jumped bail after he failed to appear for a July 26 sentence hearing this year. He used to operate an immigration agency on East Broadway. An arrest warrant has now been issued for Huang.