Thomas and Lydia Take the Marriage Exam

About this episode

Thomas and Lydia Smith celebrate their anniversary by undergoing a simulated immigration interview about their marriage.

In this very special episode, Thomas and Lydia Smith celebrate their 11th wedding anniversary in the most normal and romantic way possible: subjecting themselves to an extended interrogation about their marriage by a federal agent. After setting the scene in a (very slightly) parallel universe in which Thomas was born in Canada and committed a series of Nickelback-related misdemeanors before overstaying his student visa, Matt draws from his twenty years of experience in sitting through hundreds of immigration interviews to play out an unscripted simulation of what his clients and their U.S. citizen spouses go through when they are applying for residency through marriage. We then reconvene to review how the Smiths did, and Matt takes us through some of the legal issues raised in this interview as well as some of the more interesting aspects of the residency process generally. Finally, we discuss some of the weirder aspects of the law surrounding immigration through marriage beyond the facts of this interview, including (among many others): --Do you really have to prove to the satisfaction of an immigration officer that your marriage includes sex? --Why might the US government…

People in this episode

Host: Matt

Guests: Thomas Smith, Lydia Smith

Topics covered

• marriage
• immigration
• interrogation
• residency process
• legal issues
• anniversary

Keywords

• marriage exam
• immigration interview
• residency
• legal issues
• anniversary
• polygamy
• Zoom wedding

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Nickelback, U.S. government, federal immigration authorities

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