The fact that these case files were reviewed several years after the time when the intending immigrants received negative decisions on their applications to have their conditional immigrant status removed provided an opportunity to review and summarize later developments in their cases. Perhaps the most interesting finding is that the majority of these women later succeeded in becoming LPRs by presenting additional evidence or by qualifying in another way, such as remarriage or self-petitioning. This contrast in the percentage of women who remained in the United States and entered into another marriage suggests that women from the countries in which it is not unusual to advertise for introductions to foreign men may indeed be partly motivated by the prospect of living in the United States, although all persons who marry could be said to do so for a mixture of reasons. Review of the files 4 years after the women were denied removal of their conditional status also means that this is a picture of marriages that took place in the past, not the present. The year 1990 is significant because in that year the Philippines enacted legislation to outlaw the international matchmaking industry.
Indications are that the legislation served only to drive the industry underground.
Because of this, more recent mail-order marriages from the Philippines may be different in some way than those observed in this study. INS researchers selected all of these cases for review, to gauge whether evidence of mail-order arrangements leading to the marriage could be identified in spousal abuse cases. Although there is not a direct question on the form, these cases require a narrative history for processing, which usually contains details about how the couple met, so there is little uncertainty about their classification. The case files were requested from the offices having jurisdiction over them. Using the classification scheme described above, INS researchers classified 19 cases as definitely not and 5 cases as probably not mail-order brides.