Sex For A Green Card

Did you see last Friday's NY Times article : An Agent, a Green Card, and a Demand for Sex ? In it reporter Nina Bernstein describes a conversation between a young immigrant woman with her agent from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. What’s the big deal, you ask? Well the conversation went a little something like this:

“I want sex,” he said on the recording. “One or two times. That’s all. You get your green card. You won’t have to see me anymore.”

She reluctantly agreed to a future meeting. But when she tried to leave his car, he demanded oral sex “now,” to “know that you’re serious.” And despite her protests, she said, he got his way.

Nina adds:

And it raises broader questions about the system’s vulnerability to corruption at a time when millions of noncitizens live in a kind of legal no-man’s land, increasingly fearful of seeking the law’s protection.

This begs the question then, how often do these types of situations occur and what happens to the women, emotionally and psychologically, who generally speaking, do not record these types of illicit and illegal conversations and cannot prove their abuse?

And how different are these sexual offenses from those that happen everyday to women and girls (with citizenship) in exchange for better grades; in exchange for a raise at work; in exchange for the lead role in a music video? And how do you think we can better build coalitions between all of these women? Because at the end of the day sexual abuse is sexual abuse, green card or not!