I also want to thank Senator SIMON of Illinois for his input into this legislation. What we have today has been very adequately described by both of the preceding speakers. but I would like to go over for a moment with you the basic premise of why we need this legislation and a couple of aspects that I think need very brief elaboration. First of all. when you look at statistics. it is true that we do not know how many immigrationrelated fraudulent marriages there are that have been coming into this country in the last few years. but we know the numbers have been increasing. The press has been reporting them. and we know some statistics. For example. from 1978 to 1984. the number of legal immigrants entering the United States actually declined about 9.6 percent. During that same period. that same 6year period from 1978 to 1984. the number of immigrants acquiring the status of an immigrant coming into this country legally as a spouse of a U.S. citizen increased by some 43 percent. There are basically two kinds of fraud that are going on in connection with this. One of them is the kind of case where someone pays the U.S. citizen or permanent resident alien to marry him or her in order to get here to circumvent our laws.
Keywords matched
immigrant immigrationrelated immigrants