By David Haldane
June 22, 2024
The tropes were familiar in the early days of our marriage.
People said we had hooked up so Ivy could get a green card. Or that I was trading on my white privilege for a sexy Filipino bride. One of them even found its way into a newspaper following my published account of discovering romance across the sea.
“David Haldane Has a Mail-Order Bride and Wants His Neighbors to Be Cool With It,” read a headline in the Orange County Weekly, a then-widely read Southern California-based publication.
And there it was, the phrase I’d come to detest, the so-called mail-order bride. In the years that followed, I talked and wrote a lot about that. About how there was no longer any such thing. And how the myth of the mail-order bride had become a cudgel with which to discredit relationships such as ours.
Now I’m not so sure. The reason for my uncertainty: the recent news that four Philippine nationals in Los Angeles are going to prison for, well, providing mail-order brides.
Here’s how it worked. Marcialito Biol Benitez, 50, procured clients from around the world wishing to enter the United States illegally. Then he matched them with US citizens willing to pose as their husbands or wives.
From October 2016 to March 2022, authorities say, Benitez and three accomplices set up 600 phony weddings, netting $8 million by charging clients $20,000 to $30,000 each. “It’s the utmost honor and privilege to become an American citizen,” Jodi Cohen, a special agent with the FBI, declared, yet the conspirators “made an absolute sham of that process.”
The services provided included assessing whether make-believe couples had enough “good chemistry” to fool immigration officials; personal counseling on how to ace interviews by memorizing details regarding their “spouses”; shopping trips to find matching clothing; preparing fraudulent documents; providing wedding chapels that wouldn’t confirm whether the marriages were real; decorating those chapels with props; and documenting the wedding ceremonies with photos.
Following the fake weddings, the marriage fraudsters would provide addresses simulating cohabitation as well as help in registering vehicles, opening joint bank accounts, filing joint tax returns, and purchasing family life insurance policies. They would also keep paid partners available should future complications arise.
Ah, but then they got caught. Earlier this year, Benitez was sentenced to 22 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release. A co-defendant, Engilbert Ulan, 43, received a prison sentence of 14 months while two others—Juanita Pacson, 48, and Nino Valmeo, 47—were confined to home arrests of four and six months, respectively.
Their sentences would have been harsher in the Philippines. Here, under a law called the “Anti-Mail Order Spouse Act,” anyone guilty of engaging in a money-making scheme aimed at “matching or offering…a Filipino to a foreign national for marriage” is subject to 15 years in prison plus a fine of up to a million pesos. If the crime is committed by a syndicate or “on a large scale,” according to the law, the sentence is increased to 20 years, plus a fine of up to five million.
And yet such practices continue. Earlier this year, the Philippine Bureau of Immigration intercepted several Filipinas attempting to leave the country with fake Chinese or Korean husbands. “Most of the victims here are those looking for jobs [abroad],” Immigration Deputy spokesman Melvin Mabulac said in a public briefing reported by The Manila Times. “They are looking for a [fast] way out, evading the Department of Migrant Workers.”
One case, the paper reported, involved a woman who “endured verbal and physical abuse from her pseudo husband, who demanded payment for her food and repeatedly threatened to kill her whenever she resisted having sex with him.”
All of which, of course, makes life harder for genuine transnational couples like us and our friends. So, to those seeking love across the waters, let me just say this: be honest, be careful, be strong.
Regarding my own 16-year marriage, I have only one thing to add: thank God we did it in an earlier, more innocent time.
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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist, author, and broadcaster with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, A Tooth in My Popsicle, is available on Amazon. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.
As David knows, my wife is an original Mail Order Bride. Unlike the misleading and often misused label, I literally did order her out of a catalog. For a price of $25.00, a social group called 'Japan International' would send you a 'catalog'....it was dived alphabetically by country, each one having around 20-30 ladies each. No photographs were permitted because the staff didn't want prospective 'clients' to be attracted to each other based on looks alone, hindsight telling me it was a good idea.
Due to space limitations, we were only allowed to have a single paragraph, listing our likes and often dislikes. The ladies almost always included 'marriage minded' which was a 'gimmie'.....this was not intended to be a pen pal organization....an intro in front reminded prospective clients that this was designed for people interested in marriage.
Once my fiancee (I proposed via the mail and had to wait a month before she wrote back and said Yes) arrived in the US and we settled down as many and wife, our local paper ran an article about our somewhat unusual relationship. We've been married now for 41 years
My wife (27 years my junior) and I are constantly being asked how we met, and sometimes endure comments when others think we are out of earshot. This despite my being fluent in Tagalog and my wife, an American citizen, being a fluent English speaker.