U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., has been a national leader fighting for women's rights. This year, she was a sponsor of a bill attacking exploitation of women and children in the sex industry. In the early 1990s, she wrote a bill that eased immigration regulations governing mail-order brides who are abused. Her law allows abused alien women and children to petition on their own for permanent resident status or citizenship. That's a request normally left up to the American partner.
Slaughter finds mail-order marriages distasteful.
Some people find no problems with the mail-order bride business. A former University of Florida professor, Robert Scholes, is one of the few academics who has studied the phenomenon, an old business that has taken on renewed life with the advent of the Internet and the fall of the Soviet Union. Overall, Scholes doesn't see a problem, and he doesn't see a need for government regulation. The business is responsible for a tiny percentage of the marriages in this country, and he found evidence of little abuse in the marriages, or of abuse of the system just to get into this country. Now there are 15 or 20.