For love or visa

For love or visa? By Margaret Jetelina

Sham marriages are an increasing concern in Canada, and two Vancouver-area women are taking the campaign to protect victims very personally.

Sally Santiago has been writing letters to every minister of citizenship and immigration since Minister Elinor Caplan — that's five ministers and around six years ago — about her former husband who she says only married her to get into the country.

She sends exhaustive letters detailing the circumstances surrounding their marriage, his physical and emotional abuse, proof that the marriage was a sham all along, all her past communications with government officials and a laundry list of other victims of sham marriage in Canada .

“The word ‘removed' means ‘deportation.' This policy has been in place since 1978,” says Santiago , but she questions whether Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) is really enforcing it.

After a town hall meeting in B.C. and some subsequent national publicity on the issue this past summer, the department uploaded some quick facts about “marriages of convenience” on its website (see www.cic.gc.ca/english/facts/marriage.html ), confirming that marrying to get into Canada can lead to deportation.

It further states that Canada 's immigration system is set up in a way that discourages marriages of convenience, by making the sponsor legally responsible to support the sponsored spouse. “As part of this commitment, sponsors must support their spouse or partner for three years, even if the relationship fails,” it writes. “If the couple breaks up and the sponsored person gets social assistance, the sponsor must pay back the amount of social assistance the former spouse received.”

But this rule implies that both parties are in on the duplicity; the website doesn't really address the situation where the sponsor believes the marriage to be genuine, only to discover later that he or she was merely a tool for their “spouse” to get into Canada .

That was the case for Santiago . A Canadian citizen, she met her future husband on a visit back to the Philippines . Young and in love, she believed in the marriage vows she took, but after sponsoring her husband to Canada in 1997, she soon realized he was using her solely for the purpose of landing in Canada. Not only did she find evidence that he had been living in a common-law relationship in the Philippines while awaiting sponsorship, he also began to physically and emotionally abuse her — a not uncommon occurrence in cases of sham marriages.

He then admitted to her the marriage was just a sham and they divorced, and Santiago started her letter campaign to the federal ministers, as well as also local MLAs and MPs, with the goal of getting him deported. “It's not right that he should stay in Canada ; he broke the law,” she says.

But he is still here, living his Canadian dream. And, with long lineups to get into Canada , there are more and more people defrauding our immigration system and too-trusting Canadians to get in. “This is not only happening in the Filipino community, but it is very rampant in the Indo-Canadian community, too,” says Santiago . In truth, it happens across all ethnicities and genders — men, too, can be victims of sham marriages.

Recognizing that she's far from a singular case, Santiago founded Women Against Abusive Sponsored Spouses (WAASS) in late 2001.

“The goal of my organization is to educate women from all walks of life that the IRPA was put in place almost 30 years ago,” she says. “Our aim is to help in lobbying the federal government that those who abused their sponsors should be deported, especially if there was a conviction, and enough evidence that the sponsored spouse gained entry in Canada through the sham marriage category.”

Deportation aside, victims of sham marriages have also been fighting to ensure they won't have to repay any sponsorship debts incurred by their fraudulent spouses. Under sponsorship agreements, sponsors agree to repay the government for any social assistance the sponsored person receives (see “Sponsors in debt” on page 34). But is it fair to make a victim of a sham marriage or spousal abuse repay such debts?

She says she was very young and naïve when she met her future husband, who claimed he was already a landed immigrant from India . He manipulated her into getting married by threatening to kill himself. Then he raped her. She was ashamed and felt she couldn't face her family if she didn't marry him.

“He knew my value system and knew that [having sex] was the only way to get me to wed him. I have the same values as an Indian woman … I just had to marry him,” she says. “But when I went to sponsor him, I realized he was already under a removal order.”

She decided that divorce was her only option. But she got a rude shock when he got to stay in Canada , went on welfare in 2001 and 2003, and Singh was given the bill.

“In 2004, I bought a place of my own and then I found out I owed $27,000 to the provincial government,” Singh says. “They put a lien on my property. I was totally depressed.”

Singh doesn't understand why he hasn't been deported from the country; she was even told by a Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) removal officer in 2003 that he was being removed. Although she is still looking for a resolution to this all, she says at least she stopped getting bills from the provincial government of late.

The provincial government made a concession on collecting sponsorship debts in the case of spousal abuse in September, thanks to the work of NDP MLA for Burnaby Edmonds Raj Chouhan, who helped organize the town hall meeting last summer.

“There are an overwhelming number of people that have come forward who were victimized by their sponsored spouses and later re-victimized by government authorities that penalized them for the actions of their estranged spouse,” says Chouhan.

But, in early December, Chouhan noted in a press release that the government's new collections policy places the burden on victims to prove any case of abuse before relieving them of thousands of dollars in sponsorship debt. “We have major concerns about the criteria the government is using to determine who has been victimized and who is not, and how they are going to adjudicate those claims,” he says.

Chouhan says there are many issues that still remain unaddressed and wants the provincial government to move from a mere suspension of “debt collection” to suspension of the entire debt in marriage fraud and abuse cases. He also wants B.C. to lobby the federal government to get rid of the ambiguities in the sponsorship agreement that creates these problems in the first place.

A recently formed group called the Canadian Marriage Fraud Victim Society has proposed a three-year probationary period for immigrating spouses, i.e., if they are no longer in the marriage when that time is up, they would have their permanent residence status revoked. But certainly there are people who want to come to Canada badly enough that they'd be willing to keep up a marital façade for three years — that's probably still faster than a regular application!

Clearly, there is more work to be done to protect victims and punish perpetrators.

“I'm trying to find answers. The system needs to be looked at,” says Singh, who started a website on the issue ( www.shajila.com ) to help other victims. “My main focus is to campaign against sham marriage, to bring awareness, and to encourage men and women to bring this issue up.”

“How many victims of sham marriage are we going to allow to happen in our country?” questions Santiago .

Until the “marriages of convenience” law is better enforced, Santiago and Singh will no doubt continue to campaign to find the answer.