Rise in sham marriages to beat UK immigration laws

The number of suspected sham marriages by illegal immigrants has leapt by more than half in the past year.

Figures from the Home Office show a 54% jump in suspected cases reported by registrars in England and Wales.

The leap comes after the Law Lords overturned a government scheme designed to stop illegal immigrants marrying.

Registrars have told the BBC that marriage rackets are using Eastern European brides to provide other migrants with a toehold in the UK.

The scale of the problem has been highlighted in a special BBC investigation in which a reporter posed as an illegal immigrant - and quickly found people offering to help him marry.

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Registrars have told the BBC that sham marriage rackets have returned and many are using Eastern European spouses who have a legal right to be in the UK.

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Mr Rimmer said registrars were seeing cases where the couple could not speak each other's language and their body language made it obvious that they barely knew each other.


"Pakistani and Portuguese is one that has seemed to crop up recently. If you see one [couple] … that's OK. But when you see three in a week, you start to think that something strange is going on."

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"The registrars have a system of reporting where they think a marriage is not genuine. Those reports are then used by the immigration officials. The issue of marriage is different to immigration status. A visa will not be issued if there is reason to think the marriage is not genuine."

The government is considering whether to introduce new methods of controlling marriages involving foreign nationals, including the introduction of biometric checks.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8444360.stm