spot on.

i saw the same thing in tunisia all the time. rather sad and pathetic, really. had a few marginal friends that were more-or-less activly husband hunting. the catches they came up with were fairly pathetic in their own rights. one of the most interesting though was a local girl i knew who had a boyfriend in the UK via the internet who actually had him fly down to meet her. last i heard she's just about secured her visa for the UK to join her pale, pasty white cyber boyfriend. chap seemed nice enough. poor him! he doesnt know what he's in store for!

i wonder if there's a market for MPDMM services akin to mail-order husbands? could be quite the business venture but i wouldn't want to deal with the clientel.

What (in your anecdotal experience) is the gender split for "visa marriages"? Is it primarily Western women picking up local men? Any blowback from more conservative elements in society?

Visa marriages seem heavily weighted towards local men marrying foreign women. It's certainly easier, as marrying a local girl requires an enormous number of administrative hurdles to be jumped.

Of course one could get around that through the various fiancee visa programs available to Westerners, but one's marriage then is 'illegal' or not recognised in the MENA country, in large part.

That being said, I personally never faced any shortage of local chicas who found my passport quite stunningly handsome, and me an acceptable tie in.

Of course not all knew I am corrupt degenerate.

It occurs to me if I had data I could make a chart and get us another sexy topic.

Here's a start, though they don't seem to calculate statistic by gender AND country of origin (or at least I don't see it anywhere obvious):

http://uscis.gov/graphics/shared/statistics/publications/FlowReportLegalPermResidents2004.pdf

Indeed. Just what I was thinking. This is a very interesting topic, lots of potential for discussion.

Yes, however I would not want to make it an American centered one. I see from Eva's link and downloading some excel items that immigration from Morocco, just to take an example, has accelerated, but I do not see obvious data telling me it is marriage based, I suppose I need to download the 2002 and 2003 data, since the multi year does not break out. 2004 suggests roughly 30 percent is marriage based as of that year, a very large proportion is the "diversity visa" thing. Although now just looking at 2003, I see much higher marriage percentage.

Hmm, interesting. Why I think we should have an 'Aqoul post on this, with a sexy intro of course. Need to find some relatively comparable UK and Canada data, at least to have the Anglo Saxon comparatives. Aussie land would be too trivial I suspect (ex maybe sub Con, but that's not my game).

[editing my own comment to add]

I found the UK stats, but they're not available in convenient excel format which suggests for too much work on my part to process.

purely from anecdotal accounts by various embassy people, its almost impossible now to get marriage vias for the states and getting much tougher for europe too. but thats just the gossip on the drunken embassy staff circuit.

Embassies exagerate, but I am sure they are cracking down.

Hmm, I note I post on something quite interesting like private equity and the Middle East, not a bloody peep. Sex, however, sells.

one person's "interesting" is another person's "snooze"

to steal a phrase from the british, maybe you should sex up private equity...

ME private equity is a bit arcane (I found it interesting, but had nothing of value to contribute). Sex, on the other hand...

Any interest in Spain stats? I'm idly curious whether they are analogous to Mexico/U.S. stats - geographic proximity and all.

Well, any stats are great that can easily be played with and have some time depth might be interesting. From the US immigration stats site it looks as if one can get Table 8 in Excel format back to 1999. Table 8 breaks out by country and type of admission (although not by sub-gender).

From this one can make a little chart or two.

I'll see what I can find when I get home - right now I am too swamped by Indians and Chinese to deal with the Arabs in any depth.

FYI, I did poke around for Spain statistics; lots of interesting snippets, but nothing cohesive yet. Will check more later - have been working late, as we are currently understaffed.

I've heard many similar anecdotes in reference to Turkey, and even Gambia, so I am not surprised that this is true in your locale as well.

just a few weeks back, while I was in the UK, I was reading about "Britain's worst mum," who left her 15 -year old daughter with 35 UKP, while she took off to Turkey to live it up with her Turkish boy toy. Her 17-year old daughter went with her, since she had a Turkish boy toy as well. Both, at least according to their pics, were MPDMMs to be sure.

When my friend was last in Turkey, she found that her Turkish friend's MPDMM was visiting. This 65-year old woman gave this young Turkish lad 100,000 UKP from her divorce settlement. In many cases, visas are only a part of the equation. This lady, in order to circumvent local restrictions on purchasing property, got her young lad to buy an apartment in his name. The bastard promptly kept the place. How she still thinks of him fondly, I have no idea.

My friend in Gambia also told me quite a few anecdotes about boys who spent all day playing soccer on the beach in the hopes of picking up MPDMMs.

"How she still thinks of him fondly, I have no idea."

Or, as my mom would say, nobody can be THAT good in bed.

No joke. This lady was visiting while my friend was over. She apparently still sent him gifts, and came to visit. Of course, she also got into drunken arguments with the lad while my friend was present...

"Talk like a man, not like a snake!"