If you and your lover are seeking a marriage visa or a fiancee visa, make sure you act appropriately on all social networking sites. The immigration agency may be watching your profile and posts, and may misinterpret an innocent statement made by you or one of your friends to mean that you and your lover are not in a good faith relationship.
U.S. Immigration law often requires lovers to be separated while the proper immigration paperwork is completed. Often times, separated couples communicate back and forth through many different social network sites, including facebook, myspace, and many ethnically unique social networks.
As recently reported by the Huffington Post (and confirmed by an official USCIS document), the immigration agency has advised its staff to use social networks to clandestinely “friend” applicants and see whether or not a couple is truly in a good faith relationship.
The immigration agency already has a overly active imagination in believing that many couples are fraudulently seeking immigration benefits through illegitimate marriage and fiancee relationships. Now, through snooping on social networking sites, the immigration agency can take off hand, or incomplete comments, made by a couple and blow the comments up into “evidence” that a couple is attempting to defraud the system.
This approach is disconcerting to many, and whether USCIS should be engaged in such sneaky activity is questionable. The usefulness of such activity is also questionable, and many “false positives” of false relationships will undoubtedly result. For example, couples often have inside jokes or phrases that have personal meaning to the couple, but may have a different meaning to individuals who are not friends with the couple. USCIS should stick to what it knows best and not go snooping around. That is what she said.
If you don’t get the last sentence, I just proved my point in the example above.