We tend to marry locally because the process of matching usually takes many joint experiences over many dates and often long periods of cohabitation before making commitments.
Yeah, this is kind of a dumb article since this answer is so obvious. I'd also add that cultural similarity (and the resulting similarities from that, such as sense of humor) is likely attractive to many people, even if not consciously.
I thought the bit in the article about status vs beauty why that affects the gender division for marriage based immigration was interesting. Beyond that though, the rest of the article was either really naive or trying too hard to find a galaxy brained "puzzle".
This article is an unintentional reductio ad absurdum, demonstrating the ridiculous conclusions that result from reductionist economistic/evo-psych models of relationships.
The solution to that problem is to convince the American men - or rich country men generally - to migrate and settle in a poor country with many desirable women.
How hard it can be to get a visa to, say: Manila? (trick question, no visa needed) - And after marrying one, it is not harder to get a permanent visa/residency there than in the US. If you not let her go to the US, you better have to offer sth. else of value. No free 100k subsidy then.
Finding a job with a salary that will give you a lifestyle that will satisfy an American and get you a work visa is much harder. You have to have skills that are in very short supply locally. Most Americans do not have such skills.
True, I assumed "javiero" was thinking "digital nomads" or "independently rich". Or just missing the issue you mention. - That said, German pensioners are known to marry and settle in Southeast Asia, as their pensions are nice while alive and when dead: 55% of it (if widow older then 47 - their husbands will be way over 60) .
As a digital nomad or independently rich person you still need a residence permit of some kind.
Visa runs work for a while, but you string together multiple max duration stays with just two day trips out of the country between them and immigration starts asking pointed questions. Been there, done that.
No because it's illegal hence it would need to both be done outside US jurisdiction and you know how successful other websites selling things or providing information that is legal in their country but illegal in America to Americans goes. Hence why fraud is rife and sadly mostly against the American; you would think the US government would have an interest in benefits their own citizens over foreigners but nope.
In practice this doesn't happen as much because...
1. Few Americans speak other languages fluently and few foreigners speak English fluently. If a woman in Russia is a fluent English speaker she's likely to also have enough skills to immigrate to the US on her own.
2. Switching cities is a far easier strategy. Why go all the way to Colombia when you can just move from Silicon Valley to Manhattan, which has an excellent gender ratio?
3. Tired of having to fly 6 hours to visit in-laws on the West coast? Get ready to fly 16 hours to visit in-laws on the other side of the world! Unless you're marrying a woman estranged from her family this will become an inevitable chore.
> If a woman in Russia is a fluent English speaker she's likely to also have enough skills to immigrate to the US on her own.
This is extremely naive. Actually getting a green card as a skilled foreigner often takes at least tens of thousands of dollars and multiple years of planning, during which time you’re afraid every single day that something will go wrong (like you forgetting to update your address to ICE within 10 days of moving) and you’ll have to go back home.
For example, suppose you have the skills to work at Google, and you want to work for them in the US. In order to actually get a work visa, you need to apply for the H-1B lottery (yes, it is an actual lottery) and have a ~1/3 or ~1/4 chance of getting selected (depending on the year). So you likely need to try multiple times, and you can only try once per year.
But it’s more complicated than that. It’s hard to get a US job offer if you didn’t study in the US, so even if you have the skills, you realistically need to get a bachelor’s or master’s degree in the US first. Since you’re an international student, you get zero financial aid or student loans; you have to pay tuition in full while attending. At the same time, you can’t choose to attend the Western Michigan University or another similar cheap, no-name university, because if you do, tech companies won’t look at your resume. So you have to shell out $100k+ to Columbia. And if you don’t want to waste two years of your life on a degree that natives don’t need, you should do this for your undergrad instead of master’s, which means you want to start planning all of this as a teenager, and you want to have rich parents that approve your plan.
While studying, you won’t get a social security number until you get an internship, which can only happen after your first academic year, and could realistically take longer. So opening bank accounts, getting credit cards, and renting apartments is hard. Some hobbies that are perfectly acceptable for your American friends, such as having a paid newsletter or smoking weed, would ruin your entire life if you were to do.
After you graduate, you get up to 3 years of work authorization via something called “Optional Practical Training” (OPT), so while you’re successfully employed or have a job offer, you can go and apply for the H-1B lottery three times. If you’re not from China, India, or the Philippines, your employer can apply for a green card for you in the meantime, but you’re still a junior, so getting it approved could be hard in the first few years. Then your employer needs to spend 12-18 months proving to the Department of Labor that they tried to find an American just as good as you but couldn’t. If the H-1B and green card processes don’t succeed by the time your OPT ends, you’re out of luck and you have to go back home.
Once you’re back in your home country, you won’t be able to advance your career as you could have in the US. Depending on your home country, you might get paid only 1/10th as much or less. You can keep enrolling in the H-1B lottery, but it could be years until you make your way back, and then when you finally succeed, your job experience in your home country won’t count for much.
By the time you get your green card, you're likely in your late 20s, you have gray hair, your parents have no savings and need your help, and you realize you've spent your entire young adulthood wondering "what if I get kicked out of the US" every three days.
If you're from India, add at least 10 years to this timeline.
My husband double majored in Russian in college and now speaks fluent Russian for this reason. It did not work, he married me, another American. He did get exactly one hook up out of it, but seems like a lot of wasted effort to me.
If he spent any time in Russia as a decent Russian speaker, was more handsome than Quasimodo, and had any interest in women he got laid about as often as he wanted.
> If a woman in Russia is a fluent English speaker she's likely to also have enough skills to immigrate to the US on her own.
Yeah, not likely. I’m a fluent English speaker. My first shot at immigrating to America was probably after I graduated from a top liberal arts college with a degree in mathematics and went straight into software engineering. Now that I have left America, I’m not sure American tech firms even need to consider hiring me. Getting to immigrate through H1B is notoriously difficult. My best shot now is actually through marriage. The US doesn’t just want anybody. Even “elites”. It doesn’t need to import anybody.
If a woman in Russia is a fluent English speaker she's likely to also have enough skills to be on an international dating app. - If knowing English were enough to get to the USofA ...
Caplan suggests that the market value of the right of permanent residence in the US is on the order of $100,000. This suggests a useful market approach to the issue of immigration.
Why not make the right of residence transferrable and tradeable? If I'm Michael Brown and want to get the hell out of this fortress of institutional racism, or a Columbia gender-studies major who wants to live in a country where health care is acknowledged as a basic human right, I can sell off my right of residence and use the proceeds to grubstake a move to a place where my contributions to society will be properly appreciated. Meanwhile, if you're an aspiring software engineer in Nigeria and think you'll get a better return on your education in the US, you can buy such a right of residence on the open market; if your human capital's good enough, you should be able to get a loan for much of the hundred grand on the strengh thereof.
A market-based approach like this would be far preferable to our current mixed-up system, where, as Caplan suggests, pulchritude is a stronger asset than potential economic productivity.
There would seem to be the very large problem of actually meeting and dating foreign women as well. Most people date and marry people that live near them at the time (many meet in college, at work or through mutual friends). Meeting eligible women from overseas is vastly more difficult if they are not already in the US for school or work, and if they are already here for that they are meeting lots of other Americans so your differential value is lower.
If the women are overseas, are you going to spend lots of money to go to their country for long periods of time to meet them? How long does it take before you decide if you like their culture enough to marry someone who has different cultural expectations? There are a lot of quiet little problems there just waiting to surface, I can tell you from experience. How much of a problem is not speaking the same language? If they speak English, how well? Can you tell the difference between language barrier and "I don't care about what you are saying enough to pay attention?" All the time you are figuring all this out, and other adverse selection problems as described, you are not at work, burning money and paid time off in another country. Not a big deal if you travel overseas to work, or really like going on long vacations to foreign countries anyway, but kind of a problem otherwise.
Now one might argue "Just meet them online" but that has a LOT of other problems. Catfishing to start with, but even without all the dangers associated with that, I think the adverse selection issue would be a lot bigger. Women would specifically be online looking for American men to marry for immigration purposes, and quite possibly would be very willing to marry just for the green card, much more than a woman one might meet in person. In that case you are starting from a base of "I want to move to the US" with marriage being the means, rather than moving to the US being a bonus status feature of someone you might want to marry as the end.
So unless the quality of American women was extremely low I shouldn't expect American men to marry anywhere near as many foreign women as domestic. Not that it isn't a possibility, certainly, and I imagine if you live near the border there are probably a lot of American men marrying Mexican or Canadian women, likewise if you travel overseas a lot for work. For the majority of American men, however, finding a foreign wife is a very costly prospect outside of meeting one in college or grad school.
That's true, but there are a lot of foreigners of marriageable age at our universities, not only as students, but also as post-docs.
As for inter-ethnic/interracial compatibility, native-born American men and women tend to have rather divergent cultural and political values these days, so marrying a foreigner can provide a much better fit in some cases. One does have to be comfortable with dealing with cultural differences when pursuing a relationship with a foreigner, but that is far less of an obstacle than having to wage the all-American red/blue culture wars within a relationship.
You say "a lot" but it is still pretty small percentage. Post docs are <1% of the population after all, and while I am not sure what the percentage of foreign students are, and what the percentage of those are women, I am guessing it is less than 15% of the college female population. Further, many foreign college students are pretty high status and wealthy in their home country, so the added value of the green card option is likely to be rather less.
Further, the red/blue divide is sharpest among college graduate women and non-college attending men, so that doesn't really solve the problem much. Even if it is a red coded college male, many foreign college students are also going to be blue coded. Europeans, Australians, many Chinese and other Asians are going to be rather blue by American standards.
Worse, foreign dates are a bit harder considering there is nearly no shared cultural background. What are the chances are you like the same movies, or remember the same tv shows growing up? (Hint: very low.) You might have some similar interests in classes or some other things but there is a big gap in experience to get past.
We don't have to guess--I used to work in the office that compiled such statistics for the University of California system, so I can refer you to the latest numbers put out by my former co-workers at the largest public research university system in the country.
12.1% of all enrolled students ( https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-center/fall-enrollment-glance ), some 35,000 across ten campuses, are classified as "non-resident international" and quite a large number are classified as "other/unknown" which probably includes quite a few international students too (including illegal aliens). Almost 15,600 identify as female (unfortunately, UC now has a non-binary gender classification).
As for post-docs and other employees, they aren't publishing the numbers any more, but I recall running a query a few years ago indicating that among UC's academic employees (which includes post-docs), over 5,000 of them were from China.
As for the red/blue coding issue, I think it depends on how picky one is. Women from East Asia who don't like the patriarchal Confucianist values they were subjected to by men back in their homelands may not be sufficiently "red" if your red-coded college male is demanding that they pass a strict ideological litmus test, but they aren't likely to be afflicted with the rabidly egalitarian and anti-natalist views that characterize "blue" American women either, especially if they are in STEM fields. If religion is an issue, you can even find practicing Christians among them.
That's interesting, thank you for sharing! Do you have an idea off the cuff as to how representative UC is compared to other schools when it comes to the percent of foreign students? I recall GMU being top 10 in the country for the sheer number of different countries of origin, but I don't remember where it ranked percentage wise.
Still, the numbers are not great for finding a foreign wife: out of all UC only ~6% are foreign women, of which apparently half are Chinese. Even assuming foreigners don't date each other or have a preference for native born co-ethnics, that is still a small number. Given that the foreign kids tend to cluster with other kids from the same country or region, it is still hard to get to know them and date within the group without having other connections. Not impossible, but when 88%+ of all the women you meet are going to be other native born Americans, that's a pretty good sign that most native born American men are going to marry American women.
For reference, I am an American born man who met his foreign born wife in college.
UC is more representative of top research universities than of public universities in general, so it attracts more East and South Asians than a lot of universities would be able to.
First thing to consider: what percent of students going to college in the US from foreign countries are from developing nations? Very small percentage.
Second thing: Even if they are from a poorer country, if they can afford to send their kid overseas to college, paying the crazy tuition, they have got a pretty solid life at home. The US is impressive, sure, but if their parents can drop 20k$ a year on tuition their status in their home country is pretty significant.
Third thing: How much foreigners care about freedom in the US seems to be highly variable. Some really care about it, some are entirely indifferent, some think the US is too free and blame liberty for all the lefty social gender stuff. There doesn't seem to be much consistency there. And good luck on economic conservatism... seems like just about everyone thinks the government should spend more money on the things they like.
Fourth thing, related: If culture is heavily global these days, you shouldn't expect foreigners to be different from US citizens. The fact is, it isn't. People still have very different experiences, grew up in very different fashions, have different expectations of rules and behavior, particularly around relationships and family life. Foreigners really are quite different.
The UC enrollment dashboard I linked to in my reply to you above gives a breakdown of "non-resident international" students by nationality; a little over half are from China and another quarter are other East Asian and South Asian nationalities.
As I mentioned, there are probably quite a few illegal aliens from developing countries hiding in the "other/unknown" category, but of course my former co-workers are hiding those figures.
I live in Ecuador, and have two adult sons, both of whom have married Ecuadorian women. All of us live in Ecuador, with no plans, at present, to relocate to the US.
With regard to the challenges of marrying a foreign woman, you did not mention issues of:
Language - only a small percentage of foreign attractive women speak English well enough to really explore feelings and attitudes, and it can be much harder to discern if what she says is really true when struggling with language barriers.
Culture - There may be a few pleasant surprises, but there are also countless landmines of tradition, expectations, etc. By living in Ecuador and speaking Spanish, we have a great advantage in dealing with these issues, but if either of my sons were to move back to the US with their wives, it would pose a serious stress on their relationship, even if their wives were completely in favor of the move from their perspective pre-move.
Status - High-status women in Ecuador (and most likely the rest of Latin America) generally have no problem getting a US visa. The multitudes who are eager to move there may be well-educated (or not), but are in or near poverty in their home country. Many of them who go to the US sell a family property to finance the move. Coming up with $100K as a dowry would be very difficult, and once married, her family would expect you (through her) to help her family financially in all sorts of ways. After all, they almost certainly sacrificed to help her come up with the funds necessary to marry you, and they expect a return on their investment.
All this is not to discourage anyone from marrying someone from a different country, but the real economics, and other factors, are not as simple or one-sided as you described.
As I understand it the $100K is not a dowry or even a payment, it’s the expected increase in her earnings potential from being in the US as opposed to what she would earn in her native country.
Definitely writing from your own experience as the husband of a Romanian immigrant, aren't you, Bryan? As the happy husband of a French wife, I definitely sympathize.
"Sure, you’ll have to endure a degrading interview process to verify that the marriage is “genuine.”"
I married an Englishwoman. We had such a long period of mutual visiting [I lived closer to England then], that people laughed at us. But that took care of information problems! And it turned into a loving and successful marriage along all dimensions.
After carefully considering the circumstances I decided it would be best to live together in the United States, or as my wife once put it "My husband kidnapped me to America".
So, the visa and green card: There was paper work that drove me nuts. Then came the interview -- friendly and quick, 20 minutes + time spent making some photocopies + showing family pictures, maybe one hour total. My wife, who had heard horror stories, asked in total frustration at a desirable outcome: Why was that so nice? Mrs. Smith, the official, answered: Your papers were in order.
> Out of 30 American women who meet you, perhaps only one will actually like you. Out of 30 foreign women who meet you, perhaps three will actually like you.
I'm surprised you didn't address the fact that Americans are mostly going to be meeting other Americans.
"A beautiful woman in Guatemala or Vietnam remains a beautiful woman in the U.S."
This may be the case for Vietnam, but is patently false in the case of Guatemala.
A beautiful woman in Guatemala is an already, or soon to be, married woman. Many poor countries are much more unequal than the U.S.. This is not just from an economic point of view, but also in terms of other human characteristics that factor into what we call status, beauty among them. A high status Guatemalan (*) woman knows the market is tight at the top of the pyramid, and will not wait until late in life to marry, or at least get into a long term relationship, with a local high status man.
(*) And not just Guatemalan, but most central American women.
Median age of first marriage for women in Guatemala is 21. University educated middle class women are probably a bit higher.
So, get on Tinder, meet some 18 year olds (remember - men are genetically programmed to like younger women and ones who are likely to be virgins) and try your luck. That part is easy.
Well, for one thing, I personally know of at least a dozen foreign imported wife situations. I can't think of a single one that worked out (I know of several good marriages between Americans and foreigners, I'm just speaking of the "imported wife" scenario).
In every single case, the imported wife eventually initiated divorce. What looked to her like a high-status mate from afar, was realized not to be such once she arrived, settled in, and saw his relative status here. Then she was no longer so impressed. A suburban house looked like a mansion from afar. Not so much once she got the lay of the land here.
High status men look for high status wives. They MAY marry foreigners, but only high status foreigners, and they probably met them at some professional conference, not online.
1. Plenty of high status women are online now using Tinder, etc.
2. Men generally want younger women. That often means just a few years out of college, no matter how old the man is. So men are looking for high POTENTIAL wives, not currently high status wives.
The US does in fact sell green cards! It's called EB5. Was an interest free 5 year, $500k loan to a qualifying domestic investment (certified to create jobs etc). I think it's up to around $800k now.
The part you are missing is the meeting part. Most immigration marriage is still within specific immigration community, i.e. people bringing others over from back home. It's illegal in the US to marry for immigration purposes hence no legal services exist for that. The problem isn't one of availability but simply access. I know dozens of guys who would marry a foreigner tomorrow and purely even if they knew it was a five year trade lust/loneliness for green card, the problem is they can't meet them and many of them have been scammed tens of thousands of dollars trying.
It surprises nobody outside US jurisdiction has set this service up, even a national government who would benefit from the remintances.
Nearly all 300,000 of those are still within the ethnic ommunities, often 1st or 2nd generation or naturalized plus a ton is military.
Obviously if those people could meet people the regular way they wouldn't be in that boat nor is that what this post was about. The post is a matching problem, a lot of men would happily sell a green card, a lot of women would happily sell their time, they can't effectively match.
Most of this would apply to within-country marriage tourism too. The poorer parts of the US would have a higher ratio and the richer parts of the US would have a lower ratio of beautiful women to high status men.
Low status women in rich countries are culturally more alien than high status women in poor countries.
I have a lot more in common with my wife (who had never left China before meeting me but was a university graduate) than I would with a 20 year old who grew up in a trailer part in Mississippi and never went to college.
obese is a much higher bar. It takes time to become obese. Including overweight inflates the numbers. Overweight is possible to recover from without your body being permanently disfigured.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to marry someone “with potential”, especially if such potential comes with a long history of not managing their dietary habits.
Lol this isn't a deep puzzle. If you want to put things in terms that economists understand, then the key terms are probably "adverse selection" and "transaction costs". But the common sense intuition of "why would I want to marry a stranger I have nothing in common with?" suffices just fine without the jargon.
Also: maybe you mentioned this (I sort of skimmed the latter half), but it's important to also note the approval of one's peers as well. If you happen to marry a foreigner, that's fine. But any whiff that it was an intentional strategy is somewhat stigmatized (seems somewhat predatory; implies that you couldn't get a spouse the normal way.)
One thing that Caplan has blogged about previously is that the hypothesis of adverse selection has been empirically falsified for auto & life insurance:
We tend to marry locally because the process of matching usually takes many joint experiences over many dates and often long periods of cohabitation before making commitments.
Yeah, this is kind of a dumb article since this answer is so obvious. I'd also add that cultural similarity (and the resulting similarities from that, such as sense of humor) is likely attractive to many people, even if not consciously.
I thought the bit in the article about status vs beauty why that affects the gender division for marriage based immigration was interesting. Beyond that though, the rest of the article was either really naive or trying too hard to find a galaxy brained "puzzle".
This article is an unintentional reductio ad absurdum, demonstrating the ridiculous conclusions that result from reductionist economistic/evo-psych models of relationships.
Work remotely when possible.
The solution to that problem is to convince the American men - or rich country men generally - to migrate and settle in a poor country with many desirable women.
That's not a problem, the problem is getting the visa to do so which is near impossible often.
How hard it can be to get a visa to, say: Manila? (trick question, no visa needed) - And after marrying one, it is not harder to get a permanent visa/residency there than in the US. If you not let her go to the US, you better have to offer sth. else of value. No free 100k subsidy then.
It is easy to visit Philippines without a visa.
Finding a job with a salary that will give you a lifestyle that will satisfy an American and get you a work visa is much harder. You have to have skills that are in very short supply locally. Most Americans do not have such skills.
True, I assumed "javiero" was thinking "digital nomads" or "independently rich". Or just missing the issue you mention. - That said, German pensioners are known to marry and settle in Southeast Asia, as their pensions are nice while alive and when dead: 55% of it (if widow older then 47 - their husbands will be way over 60) .
As a digital nomad or independently rich person you still need a residence permit of some kind.
Visa runs work for a while, but you string together multiple max duration stays with just two day trips out of the country between them and immigration starts asking pointed questions. Been there, done that.
I agree. That's why Bryan's advocacy for open borders is so important. Just in the other direction.
Is anyone working on a dating app for them?
No because it's illegal hence it would need to both be done outside US jurisdiction and you know how successful other websites selling things or providing information that is legal in their country but illegal in America to Americans goes. Hence why fraud is rife and sadly mostly against the American; you would think the US government would have an interest in benefits their own citizens over foreigners but nope.
In practice this doesn't happen as much because...
1. Few Americans speak other languages fluently and few foreigners speak English fluently. If a woman in Russia is a fluent English speaker she's likely to also have enough skills to immigrate to the US on her own.
2. Switching cities is a far easier strategy. Why go all the way to Colombia when you can just move from Silicon Valley to Manhattan, which has an excellent gender ratio?
3. Tired of having to fly 6 hours to visit in-laws on the West coast? Get ready to fly 16 hours to visit in-laws on the other side of the world! Unless you're marrying a woman estranged from her family this will become an inevitable chore.
> If a woman in Russia is a fluent English speaker she's likely to also have enough skills to immigrate to the US on her own.
This is extremely naive. Actually getting a green card as a skilled foreigner often takes at least tens of thousands of dollars and multiple years of planning, during which time you’re afraid every single day that something will go wrong (like you forgetting to update your address to ICE within 10 days of moving) and you’ll have to go back home.
For example, suppose you have the skills to work at Google, and you want to work for them in the US. In order to actually get a work visa, you need to apply for the H-1B lottery (yes, it is an actual lottery) and have a ~1/3 or ~1/4 chance of getting selected (depending on the year). So you likely need to try multiple times, and you can only try once per year.
But it’s more complicated than that. It’s hard to get a US job offer if you didn’t study in the US, so even if you have the skills, you realistically need to get a bachelor’s or master’s degree in the US first. Since you’re an international student, you get zero financial aid or student loans; you have to pay tuition in full while attending. At the same time, you can’t choose to attend the Western Michigan University or another similar cheap, no-name university, because if you do, tech companies won’t look at your resume. So you have to shell out $100k+ to Columbia. And if you don’t want to waste two years of your life on a degree that natives don’t need, you should do this for your undergrad instead of master’s, which means you want to start planning all of this as a teenager, and you want to have rich parents that approve your plan.
While studying, you won’t get a social security number until you get an internship, which can only happen after your first academic year, and could realistically take longer. So opening bank accounts, getting credit cards, and renting apartments is hard. Some hobbies that are perfectly acceptable for your American friends, such as having a paid newsletter or smoking weed, would ruin your entire life if you were to do.
After you graduate, you get up to 3 years of work authorization via something called “Optional Practical Training” (OPT), so while you’re successfully employed or have a job offer, you can go and apply for the H-1B lottery three times. If you’re not from China, India, or the Philippines, your employer can apply for a green card for you in the meantime, but you’re still a junior, so getting it approved could be hard in the first few years. Then your employer needs to spend 12-18 months proving to the Department of Labor that they tried to find an American just as good as you but couldn’t. If the H-1B and green card processes don’t succeed by the time your OPT ends, you’re out of luck and you have to go back home.
Once you’re back in your home country, you won’t be able to advance your career as you could have in the US. Depending on your home country, you might get paid only 1/10th as much or less. You can keep enrolling in the H-1B lottery, but it could be years until you make your way back, and then when you finally succeed, your job experience in your home country won’t count for much.
By the time you get your green card, you're likely in your late 20s, you have gray hair, your parents have no savings and need your help, and you realize you've spent your entire young adulthood wondering "what if I get kicked out of the US" every three days.
If you're from India, add at least 10 years to this timeline.
My husband double majored in Russian in college and now speaks fluent Russian for this reason. It did not work, he married me, another American. He did get exactly one hook up out of it, but seems like a lot of wasted effort to me.
Incidentally he reports it pretty much freaks Russians out. Often they refuse to speak to him in Russian. Very suspicious people.
He SAYS he got exactly one hook up out of it.
Are you implying it's more or fewer?
More.
If he spent any time in Russia as a decent Russian speaker, was more handsome than Quasimodo, and had any interest in women he got laid about as often as he wanted.
Yup, second this.
Did your husband actually try going to Russia to date there?
>If a woman in Russia is a fluent English speaker she's likely to also have enough skills to immigrate to the US on her own.
This is not true.
>Why go all the way to Colombia when you can just move from Silicon Valley to Manhattan, which has an excellent gender ratio?
Women in Manhattan have higher standards than women in the Philippines.
> Tired of having to fly 6 hours to visit in-laws on the West coast? Get ready to fly 16 hours to visit in-laws on the other side of the world!
Budget an extra 20 hours a year for travel.
> If a woman in Russia is a fluent English speaker she's likely to also have enough skills to immigrate to the US on her own.
Yeah, not likely. I’m a fluent English speaker. My first shot at immigrating to America was probably after I graduated from a top liberal arts college with a degree in mathematics and went straight into software engineering. Now that I have left America, I’m not sure American tech firms even need to consider hiring me. Getting to immigrate through H1B is notoriously difficult. My best shot now is actually through marriage. The US doesn’t just want anybody. Even “elites”. It doesn’t need to import anybody.
If a woman in Russia is a fluent English speaker she's likely to also have enough skills to be on an international dating app. - If knowing English were enough to get to the USofA ...
Caplan suggests that the market value of the right of permanent residence in the US is on the order of $100,000. This suggests a useful market approach to the issue of immigration.
Why not make the right of residence transferrable and tradeable? If I'm Michael Brown and want to get the hell out of this fortress of institutional racism, or a Columbia gender-studies major who wants to live in a country where health care is acknowledged as a basic human right, I can sell off my right of residence and use the proceeds to grubstake a move to a place where my contributions to society will be properly appreciated. Meanwhile, if you're an aspiring software engineer in Nigeria and think you'll get a better return on your education in the US, you can buy such a right of residence on the open market; if your human capital's good enough, you should be able to get a loan for much of the hundred grand on the strengh thereof.
A market-based approach like this would be far preferable to our current mixed-up system, where, as Caplan suggests, pulchritude is a stronger asset than potential economic productivity.
There is a bunch of cool research on international marriage markets by Eva Dziadula at Notre Dame (and her excellent coauthors).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1043951X23001475?via%3Dihub
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11150-023-09690-6
https://sites.google.com/view/eva-dziadula/research?authuser=0
Thanks for sharing these links! The first link seems to be broken?
Sorry, looks like the "via" shouldn't be there
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1043951X23001475
Lmk if that doesn't work. But you can also check out Eva's website for lots more
There would seem to be the very large problem of actually meeting and dating foreign women as well. Most people date and marry people that live near them at the time (many meet in college, at work or through mutual friends). Meeting eligible women from overseas is vastly more difficult if they are not already in the US for school or work, and if they are already here for that they are meeting lots of other Americans so your differential value is lower.
If the women are overseas, are you going to spend lots of money to go to their country for long periods of time to meet them? How long does it take before you decide if you like their culture enough to marry someone who has different cultural expectations? There are a lot of quiet little problems there just waiting to surface, I can tell you from experience. How much of a problem is not speaking the same language? If they speak English, how well? Can you tell the difference between language barrier and "I don't care about what you are saying enough to pay attention?" All the time you are figuring all this out, and other adverse selection problems as described, you are not at work, burning money and paid time off in another country. Not a big deal if you travel overseas to work, or really like going on long vacations to foreign countries anyway, but kind of a problem otherwise.
Now one might argue "Just meet them online" but that has a LOT of other problems. Catfishing to start with, but even without all the dangers associated with that, I think the adverse selection issue would be a lot bigger. Women would specifically be online looking for American men to marry for immigration purposes, and quite possibly would be very willing to marry just for the green card, much more than a woman one might meet in person. In that case you are starting from a base of "I want to move to the US" with marriage being the means, rather than moving to the US being a bonus status feature of someone you might want to marry as the end.
So unless the quality of American women was extremely low I shouldn't expect American men to marry anywhere near as many foreign women as domestic. Not that it isn't a possibility, certainly, and I imagine if you live near the border there are probably a lot of American men marrying Mexican or Canadian women, likewise if you travel overseas a lot for work. For the majority of American men, however, finding a foreign wife is a very costly prospect outside of meeting one in college or grad school.
That's true, but there are a lot of foreigners of marriageable age at our universities, not only as students, but also as post-docs.
As for inter-ethnic/interracial compatibility, native-born American men and women tend to have rather divergent cultural and political values these days, so marrying a foreigner can provide a much better fit in some cases. One does have to be comfortable with dealing with cultural differences when pursuing a relationship with a foreigner, but that is far less of an obstacle than having to wage the all-American red/blue culture wars within a relationship.
You say "a lot" but it is still pretty small percentage. Post docs are <1% of the population after all, and while I am not sure what the percentage of foreign students are, and what the percentage of those are women, I am guessing it is less than 15% of the college female population. Further, many foreign college students are pretty high status and wealthy in their home country, so the added value of the green card option is likely to be rather less.
Further, the red/blue divide is sharpest among college graduate women and non-college attending men, so that doesn't really solve the problem much. Even if it is a red coded college male, many foreign college students are also going to be blue coded. Europeans, Australians, many Chinese and other Asians are going to be rather blue by American standards.
Worse, foreign dates are a bit harder considering there is nearly no shared cultural background. What are the chances are you like the same movies, or remember the same tv shows growing up? (Hint: very low.) You might have some similar interests in classes or some other things but there is a big gap in experience to get past.
We don't have to guess--I used to work in the office that compiled such statistics for the University of California system, so I can refer you to the latest numbers put out by my former co-workers at the largest public research university system in the country.
12.1% of all enrolled students ( https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-center/fall-enrollment-glance ), some 35,000 across ten campuses, are classified as "non-resident international" and quite a large number are classified as "other/unknown" which probably includes quite a few international students too (including illegal aliens). Almost 15,600 identify as female (unfortunately, UC now has a non-binary gender classification).
As for post-docs and other employees, they aren't publishing the numbers any more, but I recall running a query a few years ago indicating that among UC's academic employees (which includes post-docs), over 5,000 of them were from China.
As for the red/blue coding issue, I think it depends on how picky one is. Women from East Asia who don't like the patriarchal Confucianist values they were subjected to by men back in their homelands may not be sufficiently "red" if your red-coded college male is demanding that they pass a strict ideological litmus test, but they aren't likely to be afflicted with the rabidly egalitarian and anti-natalist views that characterize "blue" American women either, especially if they are in STEM fields. If religion is an issue, you can even find practicing Christians among them.
That's interesting, thank you for sharing! Do you have an idea off the cuff as to how representative UC is compared to other schools when it comes to the percent of foreign students? I recall GMU being top 10 in the country for the sheer number of different countries of origin, but I don't remember where it ranked percentage wise.
Still, the numbers are not great for finding a foreign wife: out of all UC only ~6% are foreign women, of which apparently half are Chinese. Even assuming foreigners don't date each other or have a preference for native born co-ethnics, that is still a small number. Given that the foreign kids tend to cluster with other kids from the same country or region, it is still hard to get to know them and date within the group without having other connections. Not impossible, but when 88%+ of all the women you meet are going to be other native born Americans, that's a pretty good sign that most native born American men are going to marry American women.
For reference, I am an American born man who met his foreign born wife in college.
UC is more representative of top research universities than of public universities in general, so it attracts more East and South Asians than a lot of universities would be able to.
I was able to find an equivalent dashboard for the California State University system ( https://tableau.calstate.edu/views/SelfEnrollmentDashboard/EnrollmentSummary?iframeSizedToWindow=true&%3Aembed=y&%3AshowAppBanner=false&%3Adisplay_count=no&%3AshowVizHome=no and go to the "student origins" tab), and it looks like the CSU system has only 3.1% foreign enrollment. 46% of CSU's foreign students are from India; Chinese are not nearly as numerous as they are at UC.
First thing to consider: what percent of students going to college in the US from foreign countries are from developing nations? Very small percentage.
Second thing: Even if they are from a poorer country, if they can afford to send their kid overseas to college, paying the crazy tuition, they have got a pretty solid life at home. The US is impressive, sure, but if their parents can drop 20k$ a year on tuition their status in their home country is pretty significant.
Third thing: How much foreigners care about freedom in the US seems to be highly variable. Some really care about it, some are entirely indifferent, some think the US is too free and blame liberty for all the lefty social gender stuff. There doesn't seem to be much consistency there. And good luck on economic conservatism... seems like just about everyone thinks the government should spend more money on the things they like.
Fourth thing, related: If culture is heavily global these days, you shouldn't expect foreigners to be different from US citizens. The fact is, it isn't. People still have very different experiences, grew up in very different fashions, have different expectations of rules and behavior, particularly around relationships and family life. Foreigners really are quite different.
The UC enrollment dashboard I linked to in my reply to you above gives a breakdown of "non-resident international" students by nationality; a little over half are from China and another quarter are other East Asian and South Asian nationalities.
As I mentioned, there are probably quite a few illegal aliens from developing countries hiding in the "other/unknown" category, but of course my former co-workers are hiding those figures.
I live in Ecuador, and have two adult sons, both of whom have married Ecuadorian women. All of us live in Ecuador, with no plans, at present, to relocate to the US.
With regard to the challenges of marrying a foreign woman, you did not mention issues of:
Language - only a small percentage of foreign attractive women speak English well enough to really explore feelings and attitudes, and it can be much harder to discern if what she says is really true when struggling with language barriers.
Culture - There may be a few pleasant surprises, but there are also countless landmines of tradition, expectations, etc. By living in Ecuador and speaking Spanish, we have a great advantage in dealing with these issues, but if either of my sons were to move back to the US with their wives, it would pose a serious stress on their relationship, even if their wives were completely in favor of the move from their perspective pre-move.
Status - High-status women in Ecuador (and most likely the rest of Latin America) generally have no problem getting a US visa. The multitudes who are eager to move there may be well-educated (or not), but are in or near poverty in their home country. Many of them who go to the US sell a family property to finance the move. Coming up with $100K as a dowry would be very difficult, and once married, her family would expect you (through her) to help her family financially in all sorts of ways. After all, they almost certainly sacrificed to help her come up with the funds necessary to marry you, and they expect a return on their investment.
All this is not to discourage anyone from marrying someone from a different country, but the real economics, and other factors, are not as simple or one-sided as you described.
As I understand it the $100K is not a dowry or even a payment, it’s the expected increase in her earnings potential from being in the US as opposed to what she would earn in her native country.
Definitely writing from your own experience as the husband of a Romanian immigrant, aren't you, Bryan? As the happy husband of a French wife, I definitely sympathize.
"Sure, you’ll have to endure a degrading interview process to verify that the marriage is “genuine.”"
I married an Englishwoman. We had such a long period of mutual visiting [I lived closer to England then], that people laughed at us. But that took care of information problems! And it turned into a loving and successful marriage along all dimensions.
After carefully considering the circumstances I decided it would be best to live together in the United States, or as my wife once put it "My husband kidnapped me to America".
So, the visa and green card: There was paper work that drove me nuts. Then came the interview -- friendly and quick, 20 minutes + time spent making some photocopies + showing family pictures, maybe one hour total. My wife, who had heard horror stories, asked in total frustration at a desirable outcome: Why was that so nice? Mrs. Smith, the official, answered: Your papers were in order.
> Out of 30 American women who meet you, perhaps only one will actually like you. Out of 30 foreign women who meet you, perhaps three will actually like you.
I'm surprised you didn't address the fact that Americans are mostly going to be meeting other Americans.
I don't think the immigrant army of fighting age men is coming here for the dating market, my dude.
"A beautiful woman in Guatemala or Vietnam remains a beautiful woman in the U.S."
This may be the case for Vietnam, but is patently false in the case of Guatemala.
A beautiful woman in Guatemala is an already, or soon to be, married woman. Many poor countries are much more unequal than the U.S.. This is not just from an economic point of view, but also in terms of other human characteristics that factor into what we call status, beauty among them. A high status Guatemalan (*) woman knows the market is tight at the top of the pyramid, and will not wait until late in life to marry, or at least get into a long term relationship, with a local high status man.
(*) And not just Guatemalan, but most central American women.
Median age of first marriage for women in Guatemala is 21. University educated middle class women are probably a bit higher.
So, get on Tinder, meet some 18 year olds (remember - men are genetically programmed to like younger women and ones who are likely to be virgins) and try your luck. That part is easy.
You will probably find that many young Guatemalan women do not match typical US standards of beauty, but plenty will. Look here: https://www.soy502.com/articulo/universidad-san-carlos-guatemala-anuncia-festival-becas-153 - some are easy on the eyes.
Well, for one thing, I personally know of at least a dozen foreign imported wife situations. I can't think of a single one that worked out (I know of several good marriages between Americans and foreigners, I'm just speaking of the "imported wife" scenario).
In every single case, the imported wife eventually initiated divorce. What looked to her like a high-status mate from afar, was realized not to be such once she arrived, settled in, and saw his relative status here. Then she was no longer so impressed. A suburban house looked like a mansion from afar. Not so much once she got the lay of the land here.
High status men look for high status wives. They MAY marry foreigners, but only high status foreigners, and they probably met them at some professional conference, not online.
1. Plenty of high status women are online now using Tinder, etc.
2. Men generally want younger women. That often means just a few years out of college, no matter how old the man is. So men are looking for high POTENTIAL wives, not currently high status wives.
The US does in fact sell green cards! It's called EB5. Was an interest free 5 year, $500k loan to a qualifying domestic investment (certified to create jobs etc). I think it's up to around $800k now.
The part you are missing is the meeting part. Most immigration marriage is still within specific immigration community, i.e. people bringing others over from back home. It's illegal in the US to marry for immigration purposes hence no legal services exist for that. The problem isn't one of availability but simply access. I know dozens of guys who would marry a foreigner tomorrow and purely even if they knew it was a five year trade lust/loneliness for green card, the problem is they can't meet them and many of them have been scammed tens of thousands of dollars trying.
It surprises nobody outside US jurisdiction has set this service up, even a national government who would benefit from the remintances.
Nearly all 300,000 of those are still within the ethnic ommunities, often 1st or 2nd generation or naturalized plus a ton is military.
Obviously if those people could meet people the regular way they wouldn't be in that boat nor is that what this post was about. The post is a matching problem, a lot of men would happily sell a green card, a lot of women would happily sell their time, they can't effectively match.
Most of this would apply to within-country marriage tourism too. The poorer parts of the US would have a higher ratio and the richer parts of the US would have a lower ratio of beautiful women to high status men.
Low status women in rich countries are culturally more alien than high status women in poor countries.
I have a lot more in common with my wife (who had never left China before meeting me but was a university graduate) than I would with a 20 year old who grew up in a trailer part in Mississippi and never went to college.
Are you ignoring the correlation between income and obesity?
Obesity rates are high in poor states but concentrated in those who are beyond reproductive age. 20 year olds are rarely obese anywhere.
I don’t think this is true. More than 40% of children in the Southern states are overweight or obese. https://www.aecf.org/blog/obesity-or-overweight-now-affect-1-in-3-youth-how-experts-are-responding
obese is a much higher bar. It takes time to become obese. Including overweight inflates the numbers. Overweight is possible to recover from without your body being permanently disfigured.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to marry someone “with potential”, especially if such potential comes with a long history of not managing their dietary habits.
Lol this isn't a deep puzzle. If you want to put things in terms that economists understand, then the key terms are probably "adverse selection" and "transaction costs". But the common sense intuition of "why would I want to marry a stranger I have nothing in common with?" suffices just fine without the jargon.
Also: maybe you mentioned this (I sort of skimmed the latter half), but it's important to also note the approval of one's peers as well. If you happen to marry a foreigner, that's fine. But any whiff that it was an intentional strategy is somewhat stigmatized (seems somewhat predatory; implies that you couldn't get a spouse the normal way.)
One thing that Caplan has blogged about previously is that the hypothesis of adverse selection has been empirically falsified for auto & life insurance:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2005/09/in_search_of_an.html