Court Opinion

ID: 9635298
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 13:46:10.086999+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:09:23.575958
License: Public Domain

*22McDERMOTT, Justice,
concurring.
In order to file for divorce in Pennsylvania a party must be a bona fide resident. 23 P.S. § 302. Bona fide residence for purposes of divorce means actual residence coupled with domiciliary intent. See Smith v. Smith, 206 Pa.Super. 310, 213 A.2d 94 (1965). To prove domiciliary intent requires a showing of intent to live within a given jurisdiction “without any fixed or certain purpose to return to [a] former place of abode.” Estate of McKinley, 461 Pa. 731, 734, 337 A.2d 851, 853 (1975).
Appellee in this case made a claim of residency, which was accepted by the courts below. However, those courts ignored what I believe was a legal impediment to that claim.
Mr. Sinha is not a citizen of the United States. His stay in this country is by the grace of the federal government, and the terms and'conditions of that stay are determined by the Immigration and Naturalization Act.1 Mr. Sinha entered this country on an F-l student visa in 1976. Since that time Mr. Sinha has changed his classification to an H-l worker status. In order to obtain such a status the Act requires Mr. Sinha, to maintain a permanent residence abroad “which he has no intention of abandoning”. 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(15)(H). Nevertheless, he successfully argued below that his intentions changed and that at the time of his divorce action he intended to be a resident of Pennsylvania.
I believe it was error to even permit evidence of Mr. Sinha’s convenient change of heart without prior evidence that he had first expressed his new found intention to the Immigration Bureau, and received approval to alter his status. Since Mr. Sinha was on record as being a bona fide resident of India, absent some proof of his denouncement of that status, he should not have been permitted to claim a *23new residence for the sole purpose of engaging the jurisdiction of the Pennsylvania courts.
I therefore concur in the result.
PAPADAKOS, J., joins in this concurring opinion.

. Act of June 27, 1952. P.L. No. 82-414.