Immigrant marriage fraud: 42 citizenship applications, 42 wedding albums with the same set of guests

From Toronto Sun (Case of the phony weddings by Ajit Jain, May 16, 2007):

Citizenship and Immigration Canada officials have discovered 42 wedding albums submitted with 42 different citizenship applications in which the guests in the photos were all the same.

All the weddings had supposedly taken place at the same Wedding Palace in Chandigarh in India's Punjab region.

"You'd have to believe that 42 weddings had the same guests," says Mendel Green, president of Green and Spiegel, who has been practising immigration law for 42 years.

[. . .]

Liberal MP Roy Cullen, who has 29,000 South Asians in his Etobicoke North riding, says many Indo-Canadians in his riding have expressed concerns over this "abuse" of the system.

"They are telling me it is becoming like an epidemic and it is being seriously abused and so sometime back I spoke with former immigration minister Monte Solberg. I suggested to him -- and I am soon going to write to his successor Diane Finley -- that immigration rules could be amended to issue spousal visas on a probation of say three to five years and if at the end of this period the couple is still in marital relationship, they should be given permanent landed status."

[. . .]

Read all of Ajit Jain's article.

For more information about foreigners using marriage fraud to enter Canada, see this Immigration Watch Canada bulletin: The Mother Of All Fraud Marriages. The website Stop Marriage Fraud also has information about this problem.

See also:

Bogus marriages to brothers, sisters and mothers being used to enter Canada

Woman victim of Cuban marriage scam. Still on the hook for immigrant husband who has already sponsored his 'former' girlfriend.

A second Michele Mandel column about Canadians duped into marriages of convenience