will you marry me?

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_subgenius
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will you marry me?

Post by _subgenius »

...and other solutions to certain posters' relationship woes:

Thousands of requests by men to bring in child and adolescent brides to live in the United States were approved over the past decade, according to government data obtained by The Associated Press. In one case, a 49-year-old man applied for admission for a 15-year-old girl.

The approvals are legal: The Immigration and Nationality Act does not set minimum age requirements. And in weighing petitions for spouses or fiancees, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services goes by whether the marriage is legal in the home country and then whether the marriage would be legal in the state where the petitioner lives.
But the data raises questions about whether the immigration system may be enabling forced marriage and about how U.S. laws may be compounding the problem despite efforts to limit child and forced marriage. Marriage between adults and minors is not uncommon in the United States, and most states allow children to marry with some restrictions.



There are no nationwide statistics on child marriage, but data from a few states suggests it is far from rare. State laws generally set 18 as the minimum age for marriage, yet every state allows exceptions. Most states let 16- and 17-year-olds marry if they have parental consent, and several states — including New York, Virginia and Maryland — allow children under 16 to marry with court permission.


Not to stoke the current southern border fire (because it can't get hotter)...but note:
The country where most requests came from was Mexico, followed by Pakistan, Jordan, the Dominican Republic and Yemen. Middle Eastern nationals had the highest percentage of overall approved petitions.


why would so many requests come from Mexico?
the linked article speculates- "Some victims of forced marriage say the lure of a U.S. passport combined with lax U.S. marriage laws are partly fueling the petitions."
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_Kevin Graham
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Re: will you marry me?

Post by _Kevin Graham »

And suddenly a Mormon who thinks Mexicans are Lamanites, has a problem with an older man marrying a 15 year old from South of the border.

"the linked article speculates"

Well as long as it is speculation and not demonstrable fact, we'll just run with it. I mean, that's the Trumper thing to do right?
_Chap
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Re: will you marry me?

Post by _Chap »

The situation outlined by subgenius certainly suggests to me that the US needs to:

(a) Update its own laws on marriage age. (good luck dealing with the complications consequent on each state having its own laws on that subject ...)

(b) Update its laws on foreign spouses to bring it into line with its own laws on marriage age.

As for this:

subgenius wrote:The country where most requests came from was Mexico,


That might well have something to do with Mexico being a neighbouring country from which a large number of people immigrate to the US, and with the fact that marriage at a very young age is still common in Mexico, despite recent changes in the law:

Why Child Marriage Persists In Mexico



Child marriage was banned in Mexico in 2014, and while rates of child marriage around the world have fallen in recent decades, the numbers in Mexico haven't moved much.

According to the U.N. Women data, 25 percent of Mexican women ages 50 to 54 say they married as children, while 21 percent of women 20 to 24 report the same — a small change over more than a generation.

[...]


The group of women gathered at the community center estimate the average age for girls to marry in Coatecas Altas is 14 but say it happens as young as 11 or 12.

Graciela Garcia, 19, married her high school friend Jaime when she was 15. While she would have liked things to move more slowly and maybe date Jaime first, she says her father was "angry and possessive" — and that marriage was the only option if she wanted to spend time with Jaime.

But when Garcia talks about getting married, she doesn't use the word casarse which means "to get married" in Spanish. She says juntarse, which roughly means "to get together."

"In Mexico, informal unions are higher than formal marriage, and this is the main challenge we are facing because we don't have all the data to know what is happening around these informal marriages," says Ivonne Piedras from Save the Children Mexico. In these instances, the couple and/or their family agree that there will be a marriage, but paperwork is not filed until much later, if at all.

Formal or informal, there are a variety of drivers of child marriage in Mexico.

"We can't talk about a single driver of child marriage," says Piedras. "But one of the common drivers in each context ... is the way the woman is perceived and the way the woman is treated."

Some of it is tradition, especially in rural areas with larger indigenous populations, like in Coatecas Altas. But experts says it's unclear why there are high rates of child marriages in states like Coahuila or Zacatecas that don't have large indigenous populations.

"It even happens in Mexico City, where 13 percent of women here married as children," says Ana Guëzmes, the Mexico representative for U.N. Women. "The idea is that child marriage is something that happens elsewhere but not here."
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_subgenius
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Re: will you marry me?

Post by _subgenius »

Kevin Graham wrote:And suddenly a Mormon who thinks Mexicans are Lamanites, has a problem with an older man marrying a 15 year old from South of the border.

"the linked article speculates"

Well as long as it is speculation and not demonstrable fact, we'll just run with it. I mean, that's the Trumper thing to do right?


Yep, because anywhere in the OP I said I had a problem with anything...your posts are just too smart....and insightful, yep smart and insightful are always the first words that come to mind when reading your posts.

Reality affirms that "speculation and not demonstrable fact" is a democrat/liberal thang...see also, collusion, kavanuagh, NK nuclear war, Russia!, tax fraud, hooker urine, cohen!cohen!cohen!, and my favorite - "we are all gonna die!"

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Seek freedom and become captive of your desires...seek discipline and find your liberty
I can tell if a person is judgmental just by looking at them
what is chaos to the fly is normal to the spider - morticia addams
If you're not upsetting idiots, you might be an idiot. - Ted Nugent
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