International Marriage
International marriage has become increasingly common today, but for many people it still carries negative connotations, because of the term mail order bride.
First, the people that object to the modern mail order bride business generally do not understand it. They believe that it portrays women as commodities being bought and sold. In reality, that is simply not the case, and the vast majority of mail order bride agencies are no different from regular internet dating sites like Match.com and Chemistry.com.
Foreign Marriage
Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, when United States was still largely a frontier country, the male settlers often had a difficult time finding a brides. In fact, in some of the boom towns in the California goldfields men sometimes outnumbered women 500 to 1, and there were occasionally areas with literally no women at all.
So, these and began to correspond with women living far away. At the same time, many European and some American women ecided to travel west, hoping to find a new life and the man of their dreams.
Notice the lack of women in the photo above. Miners often were willing to give up a lot of gold for a good foreign bride.
Smart businessmen realized the potential and the mail order bride system was born, allowing women to announce their desire to get married and look for a husband that way. The system continued in that way for many, many years, but it was generally a very small part of the overall number of marriages in the United States.
In the 1960s the large number of American servicemen serving in the Vietnam War led to a the development of a small business in Asian, principally, Filipina brides.
However, the with the fall of the Soviet Union, more and more Eastern European women have become mail order brides, particularly Russian brides, Ukrainian brides and Moldovan brides. In the last ten years, there has also been a real growth in Latin brides from Central and South America who are also looking for a foreign husbands from the United States and Europe.
The Internet has changed so many aspects of contemporary life, and the international marriage industry is no exception. The online age has seen a huge boom in the mail order bride business.
IMBRA
In an effort to ensure the safety of foreign women marrying Americans, the United States passed the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act (IMBRA) in 2005. IMBRA was intended to make these international relationships more transparent, provide women more information about the men they are dating, and let the women know the rights they had when they moved to the United States.
IMBRA tates that mail order bride websites based in the United States or doing business in the United States have to ask their male clients for background information, including criminal records, divorces etc., and make this information available to the women these men correspond with.
A lot of the online dating agencies were adamantly opposed to IMBRA, and many firmly believed that it would destroy their business. In fact, IMBRA has led to a growth in the business, because it makes women more sure about signing up for an agency. It also has made it easier to battle scammers, because it makes it easier for agencies to keep up with which women are contacting an unusual number of men and so on, because the agency has to send out the man’s packet to a woman first and then the woman has to say she is interested.
A woman really interested in international marriage might really want to correspond with a few dozen or perhaps a few score men, but not hundreds and hundreds.