Holy Moly Vicar This is Not the Way to Get Married

Reverend Alex Brown, the Vicar at St Peter and St Paul church in St Leonards in East Sussex, in southeast England, appeared to his parishioners to be well respected and a good parish priest.

However, unknown to his flock, he was engaging in an illegal activity, arranging marriages between Eastern Europeans and Africans. The Eastern Europeans were promised up to £3,000 (US$5,000) each, and all to give the Africans UK residency.

In his first four years at the church, the vicar had conducted 13 wedding ceremonies, but over the last year he had conducted over 383, which is a colossal increase.

My Brown is now helping the Department of Immigration to track these people down, and claims that he did not personally have any financial gain from these phony weddings, so why did he do it?

Two other men have been arrested in connection with this affair, and so he was obviously not acting alone, but why do it?

The area director for the UK Border Agency said that it was all too obvious that the vicar was not making adequate checks before allowing these marriages to take place, and that approximately 150 right-of-residence applications related to marriages at his church have been placed on hold following the discovery of this conspiracy.

The Immigration department are now searching for more of the people who have been married at this church, to check their status, and whether they need to be removed from the UK.

For me, not only is this a severe crime, coming at a time when the UK is virtually bursting at the seams with illegal immigrants, when the benefits system is at a point of collapse, and when crime involving gangs from Africa and Eastern Europe is rising, but it's the people involved in this affair.

Not only is it a vicar, but the people that these Africans are marrying aren't even British, they are from Eastern Europe. This makes is even more bizarre.

Why I wonder, are the UK laws so wide open, that two people, neither of whom are British, can get married in the UK, and then claim residency rights?

There is something terribly wrong somewhere.

Having been through the process in the USA where I got married to a US Citizen, and then had to apply for my residency, I know what a horribly complicated process that is, but appreciate that it's for a good reason too.

In the USA, when you apply for residency (a Green Card), you are required to show proof that both of you are living together, bank statements, service bills etc in both your names for the address where you live.

You are also required to show photographs of you both together, taken at different times. Just a wedding photographs is not enough, they want to see you both at different places, different times, being a real couple.

This takes place at a local Immigration Office, which for me was Chicago. You start queuing at 7am and the process takes the best part of a day.

Then, after all that, you only get temporary residency, which is valid for 2 years. Before the Green Card expires, you have to more or less repeat the process, to prove that you are still together, and only then do you get permanent residency.

The problems with the number of immigrants coming into the UK were realised back in the 1970's, and Margaret Thatcher made an attempt to stem the flood of foreigners coming into the country.

With so many countries in Eastern Europe now part of the European Union, people from any of these countries can now live and work in any other of the member countries a lot easier than in the past, however obtaining residency in a country ought to be a lot harder than it appears to be in the UK.

This is definitely something that needs to be looked into, and maybe looking at how things are done in the USA, where national security has almost gone to an extreme level, is what needs to be done in the UK too.

Sources:

BBC News