Female emigration from Russia is highly specific. A mere 15% emigrate for
employment, while a majority go to America to get married.
75,000 Russian girls immigrated to the USA on so-called fiancee visas within the last ten years, and an equal number on other visas but with the same purpose of matchmaking, reports Olga Makhovskaya, executive manager of a social support programme for Russian emigrant families, and member of an ad hoc team which is drafting a bill to prevent slave traffic.
As she was addressing a news conference in Moscow today, Miss Makhovskaya cited impressive figures. Official statistics give the number of Russian immigrants in the USA for the last 12 or 13 years as 800,000, while unofficial make it three million. Russians-mainly of Jewish ethnicity-have been immigrating on the Jackson-Vanik amendment ever since the 1970s.
Prominent rights activist, Olga Makhovskaya has several reasons to explain a Russian fiancee inflow to the USA. Russian family patterns are losing popularity apace. The West is pining for Russian beauties. Last but not least, the many male immigrants who come to America in search of better jobs prefer to marry fellow immigrants.
There is a pronounced generation gap between Russian fiancees, with an average age of 19-20, and their men, who are, for the most part, past forty. 80 to 90% of such marriages bring a divorce two years after the wedding-threshold term to obtain residence permits.
The State Duma, the Russian parliament's lower house, has appointed initial hearings on the anti-slave traffic bill for February 17. Apart from getting married to stay in America, it will concern far more dramatic instances, too-forcing girl immigrants into prostitution, adoptions with unseemly purposes, and trade in human organs for transplantation surgery. Matchmaking agencies will have their share of liability for arranging fictitious transnational marriages.
Source: http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/7033-2.cfm |
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