In my ESL class, there were women from all over the world who had come here to be married to strangers. Most of the women had been professionals in their countries and wanted to leave their countries for various reasons. The Colombian wanted to escape the violence there, one Chinese woman vowed she'd get out when her mother was forced to have an abortion, another Chinese woman was tired of the living conditions there...it varied greatly for all of them.
The American men that they married had never been married and though they were nice, were not the kind who would exactly be hot items on the marriage market. All were kind to their wives and it seemed as if the husbands and wives saw the marriages as a win-win deal where each person got something he or she really wanted.
In Georgia, we see this in reverse too...there are a lot of Hispanic men who marry American women just to get their citizenship more easily. Nine times out of ten, the women are really trashy, the type who look 60 years old at the age of 30. There are a lot of little half-Hispanic kids running around who I really feel sorry for because often the dads run off after they get their citizenship and these children who are usually Hispanic-looking are left in these crummy trailer parks with moms who just married the dads to have a husband. After that, the moms really resent the kids and what we're getting in the schools are tons of disturbed kids. The county south of here is going berserk.
I could not tell you how many birth certificates I've translated for Hispanic guys who are marrying these awful women. You ought to hear the women: "Yeah, Jo-say and me, we just want to git married now. I cain't talk none of that Spanish but his friend says he really loves me."
