According to Fox News, the man known as Clark Rockefeller (a.k.a. Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter) first obtained a green card (a work visa) in 1981 by marrying a Madison, WI, woman named Amy Jersild. While she claims they never lived together, they did not divorce until 11 years later.

Then there’s Kathleen Hilton, the mentally challenged Massachusetts woman who was acquitted of arson murder earlier this year. If I recall correctly, she was videotaped telling a psychologist about one of her boyfriends who “wore . . . a turban.” When I heard that, I guessed she meant a Moslem man who wanted to marry her to acquire a green card. (Ms. Hilton, I believe, went on to explain how they were planning to get married in a coffin, so it may have been merely a delusion.)

If you “Google” “mail order brides,” you’ll find hundreds of thousands of listings for what amounts to catalogs of foreigners willing to marry you in order to acquire a visa to enter the U.S. and eventually to become American citizens. Notably, the highest ranking among these listings are  Russian.

Russian women have been sexually exploited in this country for at least two decades. For example, in 2002 a major Russian prostitution ring was broken up in Los Angeles. If I recall the facts correctly, Russian women were smuggled into this country and then forced to repay their “travel expenses” by means of prostitution.

Another source of phony visa applicants is Canada. A few years ago I was president and CEO of a consulting company that employed over a dozen professionals, including computer programmers. One of my staff was a Vietnamese immigrant whose family came here to escape the aftermath of that war. Like a dutiful, lawful employer I required her to prove she was a citizen or had a valid green card. (At the time, employers had to fill out a form swearing to the IRS that they had physically seen valid documentation of a right to work here—I didn’t want to go to jail for failing to do so.) This particular young woman produced a U.S. passport, among other documents. However, several months after I hired her, we were conversing about something—can’t remember what—and for some reason she told me she was sending her passport to Canada so that her “sister” could use it to enter the U.S. Hmm.

After the Bosnian War, I remember reading about the Albanian mafia’s human trafficking, too. There was reputedly a slave market somewhere outside Amsterdam where women from Kosovo were sold. From there, they were trafficked all over the world, including into the U.S. (Learning this inspired me to write a short story called, “At the Foot,” which is now included in THE EVIL THAT MEN DO (a collection of 8 short mysteries.)

In other words, U.S. law permits a U.S. citizen to claim to be engaged to a foreigner and then bring him or her here under a guaranteed visa. Once in the U.S. a person must have a permanent residence here for five years, be over 18, speak English, and pass a U.S. history and citizenship test. (That’s a good deal more than anyone born here has to do in order to vote.)

Unfortunately, it looks as if the visa laws also permit foreigners to be exploited, especially young women.

(More grist for the fiction mill: I’m currently writing a serialized novella on www.textnovel.com, titled “Chalk Ghost,” in which a Hmong woman is trafficked into the country from Canada—and succumbs to life as a mail-order bride, of a sort.)