Thomas and Lydia Take the Marriage Exam

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:08 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Opening Arguments. I'm Thomas Smith and folks, I've got a treat for you. Instead of the usual rapid response Friday, we're doing something extra special. It's a crossover event with Gavel Gavel. And I know there was some really terrible Supreme Court news. Rather than be among the many law shows doing that horrible bad news, we'll be doing something fun today. But we will get to the bad news later. That'll be next week.

It was mine and Lydia's anniversary the other day, and Matt had an idea. Why don't we do a pretend immigration interview that married couples do? It's the interview that tests whether or not you're really married. It's that actual one. So Matt is going to play immigration agent and also our lawyer at the same time. So it's a double performance. It's a really good one. It's, not since Michael B. Jordan and Michael A. Jordan has there been such a good performance.

This was so much frigging fun, but it was also very long. So the interviews part is the more goofy, fun part that's more Gavel Gavel. I'm going to leave those on Gavel Gavel, check them out if you want. But what I've got for you folks today is, once we switch over to the sort of the debrief and Matt telling us about the law and how it works and all this different, interesting and funny stuff and, you know, kind of dark stuff at times, it's immigration law.

It's going to be crappy. Like it just is going to But we have a ton of fun with it. Once we started talking about the law, that's what I'm giving you folks today. And it's a long chunk. Otherwise, I'd be giving you almost a three-hour thing. So if you want to hear the interviews part, there's going to be jokes you probably won't get if you don't, but that's okay. If you really want to Hear the Interview part, and that's Matt, separates us. It's interrogation tactics.

First he interviews Lydia and then he interviews me because I'm the Canadian immigrant in our scenario. And then he interviews us together for a little bit. If You'd Like to Hear That, go to Gavel Gavel, go to the feed. Those two episodes are out. But if you aren't into that and you don't want to hear a bunch of personal details slash acting of us doing.

It is a lot of fun, but if you're just here for the law, just the facts, then that's mostly this episode because this is kind of once we're out of character and we're debriefing and we'RE talking about it. Either way, whether you check out the interview part on Gavel Gavel or not, I think it'll still be a ton of fun. We learned so much and it was such a good idea from Matt. A really, really good idea. I just enjoyed this tremendously.

I think you will too. Other news, if you are as infuriated as I am about people spreading conspiracy theories about Trump assassination attempts, go to Serious Inquiries Only. I have two intense episodes about that because I can't stand that. It's driving me freaking nuts that all of a sudden a bunch of people who know better are just doing conspiracy theory stuff. Some people are doing it as a bit. I thought everybody was. Turns out not.

Turns out a lot of people are not doing that as a bit. Very weird. So if you want to hear about that, Serious Inquiries Only, I've got a lot for you to listen to if you'd like to this week. If you'd like to hear the interview part of this, go to gavel gavel right now. It's in the feed and then come back to this one. If not buckle up for just the law part, just the debrief part. It is a lot of fun. I do not think anyone would be as bad as I am at that. I think most people would be pretty,

0:03:10 Matt: All right, so that was pretty accurate as far as these interviews go. There were a few things, obviously, I just didn't want to get too personal with things. No, well, I've seen worse. I've seen men who can't remember their own marriage dates who are definitely extremely married. It does happen. I didn't even ask you. That's true. I'm pretty sure you would have. I was taking on faith that you would've nailed that. That would've been a question. Right, right. Yeah, well. So it's

0:03:20 Thomas: Okay. Okay. You did not ask me the marriage date, but I think I would have gotten that one. Would have nailed that one, although yesterday I will admit this. I will. I would admit this was our

0:03:31 Lydia: Yesterday? Yes, thank you. Yep. My head like swiveled over. Like I looked over very quickly. Yeah, I know. I trust you. Mm hmm. Mm hm. Yeah. You can't have any notes or anything. Oh, and I was answering based off of when we were homeowners. And yeah, and we've been owners since. Yes. Not referring to this specific property.

0:03:33 Thomas: Anniversary yesterday as we were driving back. I was into work mode and I was thinking, we have a, a lot to get done before the end of every month, and I just blurted out, "What's the date?" And then before Lydia said anything, I said, "No, that I laughed at myself. Yep, yep. But I got, no, but I got it before you said anything. I was like, I know that, I know the date, I just wasn't thinking. I was like, I meant the question I meant was like, how many days until the end-of-the-fucking-month, you know? But like, I was just sad, like, what'sthe date on our anniversary? Not a great thing to say. Do I have to memorize things? Was I supposed to memorize stuff? Yeah, but like, what does it matter?

0:04:07 Matt: Extremely common that I work with a lot of people who are not used to memorizing things. I work with a lot of people who maybe didn't make it past third grade and have never had to take a test. No, right. So I'm asking, it could matter quite a lot depending on what it is. So if it's

0:04:18 Thomas: If you don't know, like, if you can't remember, like, a specific date, is it a big knock against you? Oh, okay. Oh, boy. No, you know, you asked me when we bought this home, I clarified when we brought this

0:04:25 Matt: Something like your address history and you're just wildly off, there was one issue that was raised here that I thought was really unusual. I will say that Lydia said that you've been a homeowner since 2015. Well, I asked Lydia, own or rent? And then when she said own, I said,

0:04:37 Thomas: Home. And yeah, I knew there was no way we had a different answer on that. Yeah, so I think, Matt, we can review the tape. I think you fucked up, because I asked you what specifically, this home, and I think you must have assumed this is the first house we bought, but it's not. I said own. Yeah.

0:04:54 Matt: Since when? And I got 2015. Sure. All right. Pretty good. The last trip thing was kind of

0:04:54 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. So that led her to believe when, how long have we been homeowners? It sounds like she answered, but I clarified, I can't speak for what that terrorist over there said, but what I asked you was, how long have we owned this home? And you said, yep. And I answered the right answer to that, or well, I answered within a year of that. I said it was either 21 or 22. I think it was October of 21. Okay, thank you. So you should add her along. She would have known all the answers. Well, this

0:05:03 Lydia: Property. Yeah. Yeah, what did you say? Yes. Yeah no I don't know I went off of like my memory but

0:05:25 Matt: Funny. This is a very common question and very commonly botched because people just remember different things. My favorite one ever, no, just that it took you a while to remember that you'd

0:05:31 Thomas: Be one that you messed up again, Matt. No, you would obviously remember, right? So what, what, what was the difference? No, you asked which is the last time we left the state. Oh, you're right, that was before. Oh,

0:05:37 Lydia: Yeah maybe we were uh-huh. Oh and he just didn't even talk about the Grand Canyon? Wow.

0:05:42 Matt: Left the country recently. What was the last major trip you took? And then you kind of, what was the trip? Yeah, yeah, sure. Right. There's always an explanation for that kind of thing.

0:05:50 Thomas: Yeah, no, that's on me, sorry. That's not me when you said left the state, for some reason that's what my mind went to, and then I thought of our New Jersey trip, but that, your, of course, was before the trip part of the country. Yeah, yeah, okay, that happens. Yep, nah, that's awesome, that's funny. Yeah, imagine

0:06:03 Matt: And I will say the funniest thing that has happened in this one is when this couple did a road trip and they went to the Grand Canyon and this woman was describing in detail about how much time they they spent in the Grand Canyon. And this guy describes the road trip and he starts talking about something cool that they saw in New Mexico somewhere else. And she's like, did you see anything else on your road trip? He's like yeah, not really. And she's a particularly famous landmark and he's like eh.

0:06:31 Lydia: Wow. I mean I'm stressed out about this. I have a pretty good memory for things and dates and

0:06:32 Matt: Yeah, I thought that was great. He got there. But they had pictures of themselves at the Grand Canyon so it's pretty easy to prove.

0:06:41 Lydia: Whatnot. I know, I know exactly. That's exactly what I've been concerned about for people who who have, for people who struggle with just, yeah, the details of things. It's not that they didn't experience it, just the recall. Yeah. Yeah, wow. Yeah

0:06:42 Thomas: How I feel, hun. Jesus, you have no idea the hell that would, I'm glad this was fake. Yeah, oh, I'm never gonna be a citizen, there's no chance. Well, Matt, what you asked about, the, you said a medical reason I can't remember, and I said ADHD. How would that go? Is that a real-life thing at all, or with specific dates? Yeah, yeah, right, sure. Oh yeah, oh easily. Yeah, I believe it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.

0:07:01 Matt: Right. So that would be something I would want to to clarify, and I said this is funny because I'm not used to playing immigration officer. This is something I would clarify as an attorney if it comes up. And often, usually I know, and I already knew this about you, that you have a little trouble with recall sometimes. And I would know that about my client as well. Sure. Well, a lot of people have trouble with dates and I certainly am not the best.

I have worked with older people sometimes who really just don't have a great memory at all. And this might be good to just explain in advance because the things that people will forget under stress are incredible. Things like people whose houses I've been to, and I know they're married, I've met their kids, and other families and other extended families, and they'll still forget simple things, just like really basic things because they're under so much stress.

And adjudicators don't always really have a lot of sympathy for that. Their position is you're supposed to be nervous. And like, of course you're going to forget things. There's some flex depending, but I mean, you guys were pretty right on. It's always just very interesting to see what kinds of things people emphasize or don't emphasize in the course of this. And I was

0:07:54 Lydia: Yeah. Look at this photograph. You don't engage really. Yeah I said indirectly.

0:07:54 Matt: Also giving you lots of reasons to be antagonistic to the interviewer, both of you, lots of reasons that you might want to argue or, you know, push back or start fights. And certainly you had your chance, but you didn't. That's good. Something you need to tell me, Thomas? Okay.

0:07:57 Thomas: Yeah, oh, you don't, you underestimate how much of my life I spend with a completely different opinion than the person I'm talking to or talking to, and then just like, yep, right on, Nickelback. Woo. Yeah. No, people I don't care about. If it's somebody I care about, I actually will.

0:08:25 Matt: Oh, okay. Right. Yeah. I still haven't seen an interview get really political. Yeah,

0:08:26 Thomas: Because I care About their opinion. Somebody's opinion I don'T care about I actually don't. It doesn't bother me. Yeah. I'm just like, okay, you're not important to me. Like a actual heat. Heated like my back.

0:08:39 Matt: I represented a lot of lefty activists and advocates and people that if they wanted to, they could have made a thing out of it. But I kind of was going in hot on Lydia for Whether's Woke and trying to get her to say that it was actually about wokeness on campus or whatever, and she handled it very well. Indirectly, it's true. It is about wokeness on campus.

0:08:40 Thomas: Oh.

0:08:51 Lydia: Correctly. Well, because I, yeah, I was like, yep, we, stories about wokeness happening on campus and we research into that.

0:08:52 Thomas: You did? Oh, wow.

0:08:53 Matt: This. Yes. Yeah, you don't want to lie about a show they can listen to. That kind of stuff,

0:08:55 Thomas: What did I say for that? Well, so for a second I was going to do a bit of like trying to appeal to a Trump voter. And then when they realize the reality of the thing is like, well, they would have everything. So then I was like, oh, OK, we can't actually pretend.

0:09:09 Lydia: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm hmm. Mm. There you go. Appeal to that. Yeah. America's the best country ever. Yeah? Mm hmm? Mm-Hmm. Yeah, mm. Oh, does that prevent you from

0:09:11 Thomas: So I didn't try. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I would do a lot.

0:09:15 Matt: You just have to power through it and just say whatever you have to say. I've certainly worked with a number of people with politically sensitive stuff, especially in this administration, and we just have to find out how to talk about it. Yeah. That's right. That is why I'm fleeing

0:09:25 Thomas: If it were me, do you do? This is just a thought, Matt, if I don't know how much this matters, but I would do a little bit of a thought. I would say a lot of like, Well, that's why I want to be a citizen of this country. It's because of freedom of speech. We have freedom of speech here. And people like can. Yeah, I love. I love that you have your politics. I have my politics. We can talk about it. First Amendment, baby. Statue of Liberty, man. Man. That's, I just want to live here.

Yeah, exactly. I'll tell you this. I can't even talk in Canada. They don't even let me speak. I'm not even allowed to. If you, if you knew you had a real Trumper, it'd be like, yeah, it's fuck. It's unbelievable. They tried to trans my daughter the other day. Yeah. They did it. That'S why I'm coming here. Trump doesn't put up with any of that. I could, yeah. Exactly. Oh yeah. I Could do a, yeah if there wasn't a record, I would, oh man, I would love to just pretend for like appeal to the Trump voter, like

0:09:46 Matt: Canada. Yes, right. My hero, Jordan Peterson, he puts up with it, but he is still there.

0:10:15 Matt: I'm practically a refugee. Yeah. So a couple of the things I wanted to flag. I was going to bring

0:10:15 Thomas: Immigration guy. Oh yeah. No, they tried to trans it. That's why I got to get, that's why it's so important that I get the citizenship. 'Cause if she, yeah, yeah. Actually, it's a good point, sir. Can I be a refugee? Oh, I'll start with this, but I may need to be a refugee, a trans refugee, an anti-trans refugee. You know, you get it. You get it? That was funny. Okay. Wow. Oh, the citizens one. Yeah. Oh, okay, sure. Jesus. Wow. If the spouse has

0:10:34 Matt: Out that Lydia had a criminal record and I forgot to ask her about it, of course, but your wife does not actually have a criminal record. Yeah, people learn these kinds of things about each other. And I meant to do this before I meant bring it out. But and this happened this morning, the officer started going down the road of asking about my client's criminal record, the petitioner, the US citizen. And it doesn't matter because you're a citizen, we're stuck with you. That doesn't and they but sometimes they will like to ask about it. The only reason it matters is if it's a sex abuse case involving minors, which is the Adam Walsh Act. So if they think that, they will run a background check. You already had your fingerprints taken. They already know. And there's a waiver that's very hard to get that you can get for the Adam Walsch Act. But otherwise, other than that one thing, they don't care about a U.S. citizen's record. And I was baffled this morning when this became a whole thing. Yeah, against children,

0:11:18 Lydia: Being able to, from your spouse, getting U.S. citizenship if you have, yeah, if the U.N. citizen spouse has any sort of like sexual misconduct against children.

0:11:23 Thomas: Or, yeah, specifically with children. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I support that more than some of the other

0:11:30 Lydia: Interesting. Huh. It's just interesting. I, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Yeah? Yeah. Gosh.

0:11:30 Matt: Specific children. Yeah. So that's the Adam Walsh Act, and it's the one thing that keeps you from filing for somebody. Yeah? Right. Exactly. Yeah! But yeah, no, it is as a matter

0:11:37 Thomas: Weird shit. It sounded like there was, like, have you ever gotten food stamps and execution or something, whatever that stuff was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's one of the least bad ones I've heard of.

0:11:46 Matt: How, maybe you don't want, because often those people are bringing a child into the marriage, right? Or that they're going to have children. I've seen it really cause a lot of stress in some marriages when somebody has had something like that and they didn't know it and it comes up. Yeah. You can imagine you have to have that talk because I always ask the citizen,

0:11:53 Thomas: In terms of policy, oof, oh boy, yeah, yikes. Well, until they say, "Yes, I abused a kid," they're like

0:12:00 Lydia: And those are like flat rejections or is there, so there's like potentially some,

0:12:03 Matt: I try to get them aside and just say, look, nobody cares about your DUI, but there's the one thing that matters. I just need to make sure I know. Nothing personal, just going to ask. But yeah, now we got to talk about it. You're right. No, it's a waiver. Yeah, right. Right.

0:12:14 Thomas: Now it is kind of, kind of personal. I'm not gonna, yeah, well, that, that, see, that's the part that's weirding me out. It's not a flat, well, there's the Epstein list exception. Are you on the list?

0:12:24 Lydia: Well, yeah, I mean, well, in the same way that like the sex offender registry like can range from, you know, you peed in public versus, you

0:12:29 Thomas: Oh, okay. Right this way, sir. Yeah, exactly. And who among us, sorry, Lydia, is a child molester? I forget

0:12:30 Matt: Right. You get the Trump gold card in that case. Yeah. Right. Right, right. Yeah, yeah.

0:12:38 Lydia: Know, other other things. So so I guess that's what I'm wondering is like there can be some amount of nuance, you know, depending on like your age and the age of the victim, I guess, and what specifically happened. And that's all taken into of consideration? I know. Give me the details so I can know whether or not. No. Uh-huh. Huh. Yeah.

0:12:53 Thomas: Forget if I said this. Yeah. Yeah, what the fuck? No, sure, sure isn't. Yeah, it does strike me. Is

0:12:57 Matt: No, so the real thing they care about is that there is a waiver available. And honestly, like Thomas was saying, in the scheme of things that they do here, the waiver confounds me because there's no waiver for cocaine possession, for example, which is nowhere near as bad as anything under the Adam Walsh Act. The Adam Walsh is, yeah, I, mm-hmm, yep, yep. Yeah, I talk about it in my

0:13:11 Lydia: That's interesting. Yeah, there's so many interesting elements of this thing. Uh huh. Mm. They added this thing? Mm-hmm. Wow. Huh? Mm. Wow! I wasn't expecting that. Huh! Oh, wow.

0:13:16 Thomas: It a lot just as a practitioner? Does it seem like it's just a hodgepodge of, like, well, back in the year 1983 they did get really mad about, yeah, like people who are bootlegging liquor, and then there's, like, a random bootlegged thing. Is it like that kind of thing? Oh boy, that is fascinating. Yeah

0:13:34 Matt: Class about how you can follow the course of US history and what we were most afraid of and didn't like through these questions. It is. It's super interesting, even though a lot of it is pretty

0:13:39 Thomas: Yeah, that that's really interesting. You take a tour through U.S. history through basically your job, Matt, like you're the stuff you got to know. That's so. Wow. Yeah, it's probably pretty shitty, but yeah, it is interesting.

0:13:50 Matt: Messed up, to be honest. The sex worker question, I want to just highlight that because that question is obviously designed to catch Chinese women in the 19th century. That was the original thing.

0:14:00 Thomas: Really? Well, you say, obviously, I wouldn't I would have thought it was. Yeah. I would've thought it Was something else. Wow, wow. Sorry, I don't think I followed that.

0:14:04 Matt: That was what it was for. No, it was because they were convinced at the time that any Chinese woman who was coming here was a sex worker because all of the men were coming here to work and they weren't staying here. There was no reason for women to be coming here as they understood it, even though people did want to bring their partners. So there was a huge suspicion about that.

0:14:17 Lydia: Wow. Oh, oh, interesting. So just engaging in the activity itself. Yeah. Wow.

0:14:18 Matt: And there was also this general thought in the 19th century that the Chinese were just inherently immoral and could not conform their conduct to Western society, and they couldn't swear in a Bible and all that stuff. And so the sex worker question, I just want to point out, is especially bad because it doesn't require a charge or conviction. It has to be a full confession. So, profession. So, and it's within 15 years, you can get a waiver if it's been, yeah.

0:14:40 Thomas: What? Sure. But I guess that's if you say yes or whatever, like, you're saying.

0:14:41 Matt: So the other things, like I used your vandalism thing, for example, I'll talk about that in a minute, but I picked that one for a reason. But the sex worker question, have you ever engaged in prostitution, is the only question here, which applies to conduct just out in the world that maybe only you and the other person know about versus something that was charged formally that that you have to admit. It's a scarlet letter. Yep. Right. But if they find out later that you actually were engaged during college or whatever, doing some sex work on the side, you lied. Exactly. Yep, and think about this too in terms of the people we're talking about.

0:15:08 Thomas: So then you're just, yeah. Even if there was no conviction for it. Wow. What? Yeah. Oh, geez. Oh. This is so Mormon. This

0:15:20 Lydia: Oh, wow. Wow, right, right.

0:15:23 Matt: The waiver is basically just like a rehabilitation waiver, which is stupid, and you have show that you're fully rehabilitated and will never do it again, which means that you'd have to sit there with... And think about at the time, there were very few female immigration officers, right? So you'd have to sit there and describe your activities and why you're rehabilitated to a male officer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaking of Mormons and polygamy, good answer on the polygamy question. I've worked with a lot of poly- and non-monogamous people in the immigration system, not naming names, but polygamy has a very, very specific definition. As I mentioned in my sidebar there, it is limited to countries in which it is traditionally practiced. And as long as you're not intending to live in marital union with more than one person, Now, of course, if you were to admit in the course of an interview that you have another relationship, that would also be a problem because they're expecting the marriage visa,

0:15:40 Thomas: Is so fucking that weird Mormon interview thing they do with it. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. Sure. Oh because they want to. Yeah Yeah. Right. And I think you've touched, we've touched on this on the show, no way I think, but like, what are you going to do

0:16:10 Matt: Right? Because they're, they're expectant fifties, white picket fence, two and a half kids, you know, and nothing else.

0:16:14 Lydia: Right. If anyone's listening, though, lock down like your Venmo also, because that's how Matt

0:16:19 Thomas: In that situation? Because I mean, generally, like, it with the podcast and everything, it's like, well, you don't want to try to lie because that feels like a bad thing, but like, I mean, take us, if it was real and we have another relationship, what do we, what do you have people do? What do you advise them to do? Right. Yeah, but like, do they check, like, socials and stuff? No, I mean social media. Are they

0:16:31 Matt: So you got to thread that needle. I don't want anybody ever lying or saying anything wrong. And as long as they don't ask directly, and the best thing is to make sure that you don't have like anything in joint names, any kind of public records, you know, if we bought a house together, like it'd be very strange because they can run public records anytime time. And they can be like, well, I see you bought a house last year with who's this person, right? Like, what was that about? And then it would really start to go down. Or, you know, I've had cases in which people live with other partners. Do they will check for any use of public benefits and arrests? So the arrests also can really often yield a lot of fruit. Oh, yes. Yes. Social media.

0:17:05 Thomas: Checking your social media? Yeah, so that's gonna be tough. Wow. What if you, like, delete it? Are they

0:17:06 Matt: Yes. They will check that as well. Yeah, it is. And so I tell people to lock it down. Even people that don't have any of these questions, I just tell people before your interview, or even once you've applied, it's best just to lock It down. You don't want any questions. They can use any any of this stuff against you. No, you're allowed to go private. Yeah, just go private, uh, that's you're right. You don't want them going through all of your Instagram photos of every vacation you've ever been on and trying to figure out, you know, who you might've actually been with or whatever, who we were living with at the time.

Or I want to really emphasize, I do not have my clients lie. I do not allow them to lie to the government. Um, but there are ways to get through this and answer the questions correctly in a way that gets you through the interview. And again, I have never, I want you to be very clear about this, in the course of my career ever worked with anybody who's not legitimately married. Or they can't all be extremely married, but they're all all legitimate. Yeah, good point, that's right. Yes, right, yeah, right, yeah, yeah, sure, right. In this

0:17:19 Thomas: Gonna be like, uh, something's weird here? Or they can, they just not find it? Okay, okay. Yeah, that's true. They're not like the super detectives. Yeah, I'm kidding. Yeah, hmm, not everyone's extremely married like us. Huh, oh wow, oh my god, I know, I'm, I'm like getting all stressed out, like wait a

0:17:59 Lydia: Stuff got found out, because like these are public transactions unless you mark them as private for what you've paid people for. And the comments, like you could be joking, but you don't always know. So that's a little recommendation from me who always digs into people's stuff. Yeah, yeah, right, yeah, wow, yeah, wow, wow, he's Canadian, if folks don't know that

0:18:15 Thomas: Minute, but I'm not gonna marry someone for their citizenship anywhere. No, it'd be my citizenship. Right. How much do they pay attention? We kind of touched on it earlier, how much they pay pay attention to the citizen, you know, like if the citizen had, well, I guess the marriage stuff would matter, so if they think the citizen is like, you know, not really into this marriage, but in terms of, uh, no, I guess that was pretty much what we're talking about. Yeah, so I guess both parties would need to, to lock it down and not have stuff like that on their Venmo. Yeah, interesting, yeah.

0:18:21 Matt: Case. Right, yeah, keep it simple, so don't have anything to raise a question, like there's no reason, and it's not the government's business and like most, nobody wants an immigration officer looking through their Instagram photos anyway. I mean, it's just like, it's, it's a good idea unless you need it for work or whatever, uh, just to keep it private, but yeah, no, same with the gambling, also very concerned about that with Chinese, uh, a lot of questions about drugs and drug trafficking. I threw in the fun detail about your ex being a terrorist because that's just the kind of fun surprises that you get sometimes in an interview. Yeah. Okay. We'll talk for a second about the record because I wanted to make sure that you had a record for this purpose.

So this is very common that people enter something that they're told is not going to be a conviction. No, no, no. This is so common. The judge told me the case was dismissed after I finished probation or my lawyer told me it wouldn't be a convention in Canada or whatever. And you still have to put put it down. And for federal purposes, because it is both a restraint on your liberty and an admission of guilt, it goes down as a conviction. So that's a real hang-up for a lot of people that they don't realize that they have convictions. And a lot these stories you hear about people being pulled aside in the airport, that's what's been happening, is people that had convictions and did not know it. Yeah. And same with the states. Every single state has some kind of

0:19:06 Thomas: Yeah, that's the funniest thing. I set the record for goals in, uh, 2000, oh no, sorry, different kinds right, yeah, so stuff in another country that their system is like, eh, not as big on, you're saying it counts as a conviction here or is a, wow, wow, yeah, really, what kind of freaking eggs was dinosaur

0:19:59 Matt: Pretrial diversion program, and Congress specifically changed the law to to make sure that none of those counted, which is terrible. And actually, the vandalism thing is Justin Bieber's facts. Not the Nickelback part, but I remember Justin Bieber egged a house and actually caused a significant amount of damage, something like $80,000 worth of damage. It's just a really delicate house, I guess. But I remember at the time being amazed that... Technically speaking, he could have actually been convicted of what's called an aggravated felony and been barred for life from citizenship. So he got a good deal on that when he got probation. But But little things like that, you know, like little stupid childhood things.

0:20:16 Thomas: Eggs? What do we, oh shit, yeah, those in egg houses don't yeah, yeah, I don't know if you've gotten to represent anybody, but would you assume

0:20:40 Matt: Right.

0:20:41 Lydia: Yeah, yeah, wow, that's so crazy, wow, no, I don't think so, like Planned Parenthood also, I mean

0:20:41 Matt: Little things like vandalism, shoplifting have huge consequences.

0:20:47 Thomas: And probably you couldn't talk about it, but would you assume, if you had a client who was like kind of famous, would you assume that could work to their benefit? You know, you talk about Justin Bieber, it's like, do you think they're gonna, you know, maybe get a little bit of an easier time with this kind of interview? Just depends. Yeah, right, yeah, no kidding, oh boy, are you serious

0:20:56 Matt: Yeah. Depends on what they're famous for or what they'RE doing. I mean, if they're like an outspoken documentary filmmaker who's just making films about genocide in Gaza, right, that's going to be a problem right now. If they're influencers, then we're letting all those guys in right now, we're fast-tracking influencers, we love them as talents. The other most talented thing you can do is be an influencer right now they're giving out those talent visas. Jesus. And we're struggling to get, I'm not even joking. Yeah, no. So like Nicole's extremely talented, like Juilliard-educated violinists are having to fight for it while these influencers are getting waved in. It's an upside down world. Very much in the same way that the only refugees right now are South African white people, right? Those are the only people who are holding it. We got to talk about that sometime. Yeah. Yeah but you know all those questions I asked you,

0:21:17 Thomas: Wait, you're actually serious right now? Oh my god, Jesus Christ, oh my God, yeah, that's, I saw that yes, I saw the story, I just, boy, that is just so stupid. Oh God, yeah, yeah, oh, I think I'm here, I

0:21:45 Matt: I skipped a couple but all those questions come up at the interview and imagine if your first language is not English, imagine as you said even if it is English, like they often do rattle them off that fast. Yeah, well, I think you did actually must represent something about the club or group

0:21:55 Thomas: I don't think I would have any chance if this was a real thing. No, I don't even know if I was.

0:22:01 Matt: Or membership, right? Because you were, I might get your history wrong here, but we were board members in American Atheist. Oh, okay, were you really? Were you like a dues-paying member or something? Okay yeah, sure, sure, right, right, no, and that has not, right, yeah, that's not really, yeah, yeah, that's

0:22:12 Thomas: No, that's why I asked about the ACLU thing. Yeah, well, I've donated to stuff, but if donating, and I donate to ACLU, I donate to, I probably do American Atheist. I can't remember actually now that I think about it. But if that doesn't count, if just being a donor doesn't account, then no. Okay, yeah. Planned Parenthood, yeah, yeah I donate.

0:22:29 Lydia: Like something like that. Yeah. Oh, wow. Mm-hmm. Yeah, right. Mm. Wow. Right, right?

0:22:31 Thomas: Donate to a lot of those, yeah right now it's like, yeah yeah.

0:22:33 Matt: Just a cause, and remember, as we talked about on Friday with Mahmoud Khalil, that was actually a weird made-up thing because he worked at the UN. They decided that was a membership organization, which is very strange. That's a job. That was an internship. That was not being a member of a club. Yeah, yeah. Right, right. And you

0:22:46 Thomas: Yeah. And I asked Matt, I guess you don't always get to listen to Oahan, but yeah, I asked Matt, like, so your whole job now is like, how are you even going to, how do you even ask your clients? Like, have you ever just talked to somebody? I don't even know, you know, like how to even do it. Oh, really? Okay. So, you know, I don't, I, I

0:22:58 Matt: Can imagine how some of these questions that I was asking you, how these things could be interpreted later or go wrong. If it turns out that you actually were a regular drug user in Canada and you said you've never violated any controlled substances laws, right? But again, it's just better if you haven't been charged or convicted and you don't know what the law is in any given jurisdiction. You don't no, that's the best way to go. If it's basically malpractice, but the UN thing is so out there,

0:23:17 Thomas: Don't know if this would have come up for you, Matt, but what about if your lawyer, like in that situation, do you have a good defense? If your lawyer said like that thing doesn't qualify, is there any chance that you're like, well, my lawyer said I didn't even have to put the UN thing. That's what I'm saying. Like not malpractice, but like maybe just a little bit of not quite right advice, or it sounds like some of this is really how they feel on the given day, the immigration people. So is that a defense really? Or only if it rises to that level of just being, yeah. Yeah. Whatever's true is true. Yeah, have you ever had

0:23:35 Matt: Like that's not something, yeah, right. Yeah, sure. Yeah. I always tell people if there's a benefit of doubt, something you really don't understand, just blame me. It's fine. Like I can take it. And if there is something that's just not like not consistent in the form with what is true, then, you know, whatever is true is true. Like that's, we'll change the form. It happens. You just wouldn't believe the things that get missed sometimes, the things we don't think about. We try to ask every possible question. But it is really strange to watch people being asked directly if they're spies for their country or if they are trying to overthrow the US government within weeks of January 6th going to these interviews.

No, not that I know of. They're pretty good. They got through. Yeah, that's how it works. But yeah, these are the questions that you're being rapid fired, asked, maybe through a translator, maybe not. And I go over the important ones with everybody. And this is the other thing. The thing that was really unrealistic about this is we didn't practice. We didn't sit down for an hour and talk it out and make sure that you knew exactly what kinds of questions you expect. It really depends. Depends on, I can get a sense of the

0:24:14 Thomas: A spy? Yeah, it must have been a great spy, yeah, wow. How much do you have to do of that? Because because I would never feel ready. How many practices do you do on how thorough they are?

0:24:43 Matt: Couple and sort of how good they're... Yes, exactly. How ADHD. Yeah. Yeah, we don't charge

0:24:45 Thomas: Like, oh, Jesus. All right. Hey, cancel my fucking weekend. I got to talk to this idiot forever. How many fingers am I holding up? Can you answer that one? God, that's kind of weird.

0:24:59 Matt: Per meeting or anything per hour. So it's just until everybody feels like we're ready. And I've had plenty of people where they just feel better if they can just go over it a few times. But again, we're not working from a script. I'm not giving anybody any answers. I'M just making sure that I know what they're going to say and they know what THEY'RE GOING TO SAY. And it happens all the time, especially when you're talking about early history of the relationship, that Casey and I still don't totally agree on how we met, and that was 22 years ago. It is weird, but there were a lot of open bars at Seton Hall Law School. Yeah, but I just feel like it's kind of... Right, exactly. Facebook was when I was in law school.

0:25:27 Thomas: Slightly pre-social media or something. So you can't like actually track down the answer to that. Matt. Yeah. Wow. He said that? That fucking woke, softy. Yeah, weird. That's a weird combination

0:25:33 Matt: It is good to kind of make sure, because people... I remember one of the only things I ever agreed with Mitt Romney when he was running for president, when he said you shouldn't need a lawyer to immigrate to the United States, right? And I agree. This shouldn't exist, yeah. He was pretty reasonable on a lot of it. Yeah. He also was the only person ever to run on the idea of forcing people to self-deport, but you know, can't be perfect. But he said that in the debates and it really stuck with me. It is, it is. He was trying to be moderate. He's trying to strike that balance. But of course, time wasn't right for that. The fact is, this is a very important sworn statement. You're saying all kinds of things could be used against you. And there's all kinds of ways to misinterpret or misunderstand. I don't think there's too much in this one between you two. I mean, again, I knew you guys would be pretty easy for this because you do spend so so much time together. You know each other really well.

And I wasn't also getting into stuff that we usually would get more into in immigration interviews about your kids and habits and routines. I just didn't want to bring your kids into it. Oh, I'm sure. No doubt. No doubt. I mean, because I know you're like, you're sharing responsibilities and you work together and

0:25:55 Thomas: Of things, Matt. I think we'd be pretty good at that, though, actually, maybe. Yeah because we're extremely married. Yeah oh boy yeah it would be me me being embarrassed for sure. What's the name

0:26:32 Matt: Right. Yep. Yep, yeah. Yeah. Now they'll let you. Yeah, yeah, no, it can happen. They're pretty

0:26:33 Thomas: Of the school they go to? Oh boy give me a sec. Give me a second. I will get there. Does anyone Anyone ever get dinged for taking a little too long? That would be my thing was because I especially with the nerves, like if I was actually nervous, they'd be like, what's the name of the school?

0:26:33 Lydia: Oh, really?

0:26:42 Lydia: Tip of my tongue. What is that? Yeah, yeah. Oh no, bleep. Uh, it's kind of sad. Yeah, I don't know.

0:26:47 Thomas: I'd be fucking Jesus Christ. Yeah. No, no, I should bleep it. Yeah, I know it. But like, yeah, I could I could imagine taking too long, especially with me and with stress. I can imagine taking way too long on stuff that I really should know. Mm hmm.

0:27:06 Matt: Patient. They'll give you time. They will also let you repeat a question if you're not really sure as you can think a little bit more. The thing that often trips men up, especially as stepkids, if it was like a recent marriage, and mom basically handles the school arrangements and is talking to the teachers and everything. And I've had more than one stepfather who doesn't know the kid's birthday and things like that. It happens when you've got to be married within the last couple of years. And it is a little sad, but it can be. But usually it's because people

0:27:17 Thomas: Right. Sure. Yeah. No, I mean, I get it.

0:27:27 Lydia: Yeah, I think I know those. I think I know your siblings' birthdays.

0:27:28 Thomas: Birthdays? Or, yeah, would they ask me my siblings' birthdays? Because I would fuck that up. Okay, good.

0:27:30 Matt: Are just working so much and the kid already has, maybe it's a 15-year-old kid and, no, no. Yeah. We'll say this is a pretty typical combination of the U.S. citizen woman who's

0:27:36 Thomas: That doesn't matter, you know. Yeah, you, I know you do. I don't know anything.

0:27:39 Lydia: Things, yeah, yeah, audio production, yeah, yeah. Hey, and, and you handle all the finances and stuff and

0:27:46 Matt: Totally on top of it and the immigrant man who's just kind of like showing up. But that's men and women generally in heterosexual relationships, right? It's not anything to do with the immigrant. It's just the woman is usually the one who's like handling all of the stuff. Yeah. Yes. Right. Right, exactly. Yeah, that's another thing that they would... And again,

0:27:47 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, it's showing up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, if they started grilling me about podcasts then all of a sudden, different story. Yeah, yeah. Why don't you ask her about some of the, uh, EQing we do and how the track routing goes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Have Lydia ballpark anything about our taxes or financial situation. She'll have no idea. Yeah mm-hmm yeah. Oh wow yeah would

0:28:11 Lydia: So, like, that's fine. I can't answer anything about those accounts. And yeah, I don't feel like we have zero dollars. Am I close? Yeah. Yeah, I think I could get the general questions and stuff.

0:28:27 Matt: I just wasn't going to get in this kind of detail. There's no reason to have the audience hear about what your mortgage payment is and what your monthly expenses are like. But those are questions, right? And then who pays the mortgage? How much is it? If you have a landlord, do you give the money to the landlord? Do you pay it online? All that kind of stuff that you'd expect people to know. What bank is your mortgage with? That kind of stuff. We have that too. Yeah. Worse and worse

0:28:41 Thomas: You get any of that hun? I don't think those are, I think you would be fine. You'd probably just guess. Yeah. Oh boy. I see. I might get that wrong because they sell it all the time. Those assholes sell the mortgage back and forth. Yeah, I don't. Ours has been like five. Yeah it's a lot.

0:28:47 Lydia: Yeah. Well, okay. But that's hard. Yeah. They sell it all the time. Yeah? It's constant.

0:28:55 Matt: Companies every time. Yeah, and there are a number of things here that could have generated a request

0:28:59 Lydia: Dent. Yeah. 24-7. We got an A. Okay. Yeah, I want to know. I want

0:28:59 Thomas: I think I would get that but I'm actually not 100% sure. Like your Spotify listing history?

0:29:05 Matt: For evidence. So basically, I should say what happens after. Probably also, they would have have asked a lot more about the podcast and had some interesting questions about being self-employed and like how it's worked to work together, you know, and like what your routine is working together. I just, you know, didn't want to get in all that. Um, I'm too familiar anyway. I knew you'd have that nailed. Like, there's no question. Uh, you know, obviously you could talk about that. Um, yeah.

0:29:14 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, yeah, it's easy. We can do that. Yeah that's all we do.

0:29:26 Thomas: You finally, I'm in my element. Thank you, sir. Keep asking these questions. Yeah, wow. Yeah, well, Matt

0:29:30 Matt: Right, right. The one thing I didn't ask you about, yeah. So usually the, like, the nicer officers will just be like, "Yes, I'm recommending this for approval. I'm just going to run it by a supervisor. They have to sign off on it, but, like, we might be able to generate the card today." Like, that really, like, happens, especially in the extremely married cases. I mean, really, there was a period there where they weren't able, yes, you definitely got an A, and not an A plus necessarily, but you got an A. Sure, that might've been phrasing. That's true. It was my first time ever doing a marriage

0:29:52 Thomas: Fucked up the question about the how the the homeowner thing. That is firmly on Matt. I messed up the one that was the other thing someone said. What was it that definitely was? I remember it was my fault, whatever it was. The homeownership thing was Matt's fault. Yeah, yeah, yeah, huh, yeah. They come

0:29:55 Lydia: To know exactly what did we mess up? Yeah, yeah. Wow. Buddy

0:30:07 Matt: Interview, actually. I do practice interviews with people, but I don't usually get too formal. I'll just kind of give them the sense of it. The other thing, since this is not a visual medium, the officer often is just taking notes and not looking at you. So it feels kind of weird and impersonal, but sometimes they do do that. Sometimes they want to do like a bad cop thing where they'll kind of do. I actually did have a good cop, bad cop immigration interview once where they had two people and it was, the bad cop line item has been, but it was pretty

0:30:23 Thomas: Come in and punch you, and then that's that is so funny. How do they have the budget for that?

0:30:30 Thomas: Hey, we got new budget, we can afford a duplicate of everybody. So whoever, whoever's good, you get a bad, whoever's bad, you get a good. We're just gonna duplicate it, buddy. Say yes, buddy cop system

0:30:38 Lydia: System. Oh, wow. Oh. Oh wow. That's crazy. Oh yeah. Correct. Yeah. Right. Yeah that you're

0:30:43 Matt: Intimidating. I got to say, like it was like, this guy looked like an FBI agent, the guy they had as the bad cop. And there were a lot of valid things that my client, I mean, it was a situation where my client was much older than his wife and there were some real questions there, but but it happens, you know, and it was a valid marriage. But generally speaking, like they don't get too personal or too intimate. And those are the times when I have had to stop the interview. I will tell you the one time that we called for a supervisor within 20 seconds. I might've told you this. Yeah. It's worth repeating because I never saw this officer again after we called a supervisor. I've only had to call a supervisor twice, but yeah, this was after they interviewed the US citizen. And, you Know, he had disclosed that he was living with HIV and treating it and doing fine. And then the very first question that they ask the immigrant woman is, why did you marry a man with HIV? And that is so inappropriate. That is just so offensive

0:30:53 Thomas: Yeah, fair. Yeah, oh, I feel like you've told me this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What the hell was that?

0:31:30 Thomas: Yikes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously that sucks, but is their thinking like, oh, if they're trying

0:31:33 Matt: And inappropriate. I'm even sorry that I had to ask that out loud right now. And she just started crying. And I said, supervisor, we're going to talk to a supervisor. Because the interview had already been going kind of weird. I could sense there was an edge to it that I didn't like. And that was just out of line. That was not somebody who should be interviewing people. Right. Yeah.

0:31:52 Thomas: To find scam marriages, like, well, surely you could have never wanted to marry someone who has HIV? Like, is that the thinking they're doing, or are they just being bigoted in some way? Yeah, that's

0:31:59 Matt: Yeah. This person is unmarriable, basically. Yeah. I mean, a similar one was like, well, ma'am, you've married two people from Kenya before. Why do you think this is going to go any better? Would anybody ever ask you've married two Americans before? Yeah, exactly. And she's really big in her community and those are the people that she knows and is closest with. It's just in the community. Yeah, it's awful. I think sometimes I don't think about how these sound. These are unusual. These are outliers. I remember them for a reason because generally they're very professional. Oh, yeah.

0:32:04 Thomas: Rough. Oh my, oh my God, are you kidding me? Holy shit. Yeah, are like two white people Wow, boy, that is that is some racist shit. Holy crap. Wow. Yeah, and I'm sure you get the odd one That's like great, right? That's some, like, good people that do this job and must be nice.

0:32:39 Matt: Yeah. And some of them, like they're coming from backgrounds where they're already pretty good at reading people. Most of them are not lawyers, but they're generally pretty good with people. And I really appreciate it when they can just sit down with somebody and be comfortable and warm and you can get so much more out of people when you're just like, hey, how'd you meet? And then just kind of laughing along with their stories and like genuinely enjoying like doing it like an interview, you know, like actually like a podcast interview.

0:32:58 Thomas: Yeah, but you're going to be a self-selected thing because, like, you say you're not in there scamming McScamerson, trying to do so. I have to imagine there's, like, an evil universe Matt, or or not even evil, but, like, just somebody who's, like, maybe taking more questionable clients. Maybe they have a different experience, I guess. Yeah, yeah. No, you did do that one. There was a

0:33:00 Matt: Right. Yeah.

0:33:14 Matt: Or people don't have lawyers. I mean, I've heard it can get pretty rough without a lawyer in the room, even for good cases. And there are all kinds of ways that things can start to go off the rails if the officer starts to get on to, like, an inkling of something that maybe you're trying to cover up. And I had originally proposed as a fact here, as a secret fact, that you'd worked for Lydia's cousin at some point and didn't want, neither of you wanted to mention this because you don't want to get him in trouble. I did eventually ask you, but I didn't, I didn't make a thing of it. Yeah, I was just kind of flagging

0:33:35 Thomas: Different one you left out, I think. Oh, oh, maybe you didn't ask Lydia it or something. Okay, right.

0:33:43 Matt: That as the kind of thing, right, of like, it's, it's good intentioned, it's well meaning, you don't want to get your cousin in trouble, but nobody cares, like, nobody's actually going to go prosecute your cousin for that. They just want to know where you're working. And it's all excused. So you can just say, but I've had people get into real problems when they start to, for good reasons, start to cover something up or don't want to talk about something embarrassing. Or, you know, you don't, your wife doesn't know that you actually were picked up for soliciting a sex worker 10 years ago, right?

I mean, these things happen. And I try to make sure that there's no surprises at the interview, but I often have to take people at their word if they've lived in a lot of different jurisdictions. We're not going to do background checks on all of them necessarily. But if I think somebody's been arrested more than once, I'll always just do an FBI background check. That doesn't catch necessarily everything. Oh, it's pretty easy to do just through the post office. You can just do the same one that the FBI does. With their signed permission, you can

0:34:02 Thomas: How do you do an FBI background check? You're allowed to do that. What you can as a lawyer Anyone can do this. Okay. Oh, so you tell your previous country that you're married

0:34:33 Matt: Run one for them. And then if they've only lived in Massachusetts, I'll just run a court/state check here. People are often, for plenty of reasons that we can understand, not very honest about their records, or they genuinely think, I don't have to tell my lawyer about that because it was dismissed. And you do, because if you've had a bunch of the same kinds of cases dismissed, they do care.

They're not supposed to care, but you have to account for every contact you've had with the system at all, no matter what happened. And I understand why people think you don't if it's been dismissed, but you do. So these are things that trip people up. There's also the fact that I was going to try to set this up a little bit more because I had kind of a strange thing this morning, but it was on my mind.

But this doesn't really apply because in this scenario, you're coming on a student visa. But if you were just coming and going over the Canadian border, which is very easy for Canadians to do because of NAFTA, but you still have to check at the border, obviously. And if you'recoming and going and you're living in Canada and you're coming to visit Lydia, at some point, there'd be a question of what is your intent here?

Are you at some point, if you do overstay the 90 days you're supposed to be here, did you come to the United States intending to remain and get married and become an immigrant? And as a student, it doesn't matter because you're a dual intent immigrant, non-immigrant and immigrant at the same time. You're allowed to change status because we assume that people will come here and get jobs and get married, potentially. We want to keep that option open for them.

But if you come on a tourist visa, you're just supposed to visit. So that's different. And we want to ask a lot of questions about what your intentions were when you came in. That's another big thing that comes up a lot. But also, unfortunately, people on their visa applications will be told to put things down or other people fill them out.

And a lot of times to get a tourist visa, people will be advised to tell them that you are married because then you have a reason to come back. Because for a tourist visit, you have to be able TO show that you are going to come back to the country that you're in. So you want to make sure, especially if it's a country that has a high denial rate, you tell the U.S. consulate when you're going in for your interview for the tourist visa.

0:36:12 Thomas: Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry, yeah, yeah, yep. And so they do that not thinking one day they

0:36:14 Lydia: Married. So there's a reason that you are going to leave. To return to your spouse. Yeah, yeah.

0:36:15 Matt: Right, right, exactly. And right, right.

0:36:20 Lydia: Yeah. Might fall in love with somebody actually in America.

0:36:20 Matt: Right. And also that maybe you have a good paying job, but you can show that you have a reason to come back. You're just on leave for a couple of weeks or whatever. So there's all kinds of things that come up. Yes. Yeah. Right.

0:36:31 Thomas: You know, yeah, yeah. Oh wow, this just seems like so much wasted energy, you know. Like, I know that we

0:36:34 Matt: And have to be confronted by that. And then honestly, it gets really bad when they're trying to cover up the fact they're coming to visit the person they're going to marry. So they don't put that person as their contact or whatever, you know? So there're just a lot of different ways that things that happened 15 years ago can trip you up. There are waivers available potentially for those kinds of thing, but it's case by case. So you really got to try to tell the system the truth at all times. It is very important. A lot of it, it is.

0:36:34 Lydia: Oh, wow. Yeah. Wow.

0:36:59 Thomas: Need, we need some level of immigration, of course, like some level enforcement of stuff, but like, man, that's a lot of effort, you know. Five hours, this, this felt like five hours. Well, yeah, I mean,

0:37:07 Matt: It is. And the longest marriage interview I've had was five hours. Yep, did not stop for lunch.

0:37:15 Lydia: I feel like I could keep going. I don't know. For me, I was like, yeah, keep asking me questions, Matt.

0:37:19 Thomas: Mean, but imagine if you were actually stressed about it. I think it would be pretty bad. Yeah.

0:37:21 Lydia: Yeah. No, no. 100%. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah yeah.

0:37:22 Matt: Yeah, you just want to get out of there. And honestly, we were also role-playing a white

0:37:24 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, for sure, yeah, yeah, because that's the main purpose of this one is just like, if the

0:37:28 Matt: Canadian, right? So that's as easy as it gets. It's a different system than somebody from Nigeria, Kenya, right, who they can't even get immigrant visas for the most part. They still can through marriage, but right now there's a visa pause in a lot of countries because of racism. A lot of countries don't want people from. That was pretty accurate length of time, I think, for white Canadian. It would have been a lot shorter in this real scenario because you have such established bona fides and you've been together for so long. Like, if this is a green card marriage, you just forgot to do it. Forgot to get around to filing for them, because it's pretty weird. Yeah, right.

0:37:44 Lydia: Yeah.

0:38:06 Thomas: Marriage is real, but then also if there's other weird stuff. Oh, okay. Like it didn't take, they're

0:38:09 Matt: So I should have mentioned before, this is actually, it's always two interviews combined. Behind, you're doing the visa interview first, and then we move down to the residency interview, and that's when you get all those weird questions. And that's what we try to determine your fitness as an immigrant, your admissibility. The first part is often no trouble, but then there's all kinds of other issues. One other thing that comes up a lot is if you previously engaged in anything that looks like marriage fraud, if you had a bad interview when you were a teenager, you got married and came in with somebody, and it happens sometimes. Yeah, that's happened. It might be a

0:38:38 Thomas: Like, yeah, I wonder if you quit them. Hey, uh, this marriage isn't gonna work out because we couldn't pass our marriage interview. You're just like, guess we're not getting together. Wow. Jeez. Yeah.

0:38:47 Matt: A sign. Maybe you shouldn't be together. Yeah. Oh man. Yeah, you break up and then marry your

0:38:47 Lydia: Yeah. The next Hallmark Channel movie.

0:38:50 Thomas: Actually, you should have married the immigration attorney there. It's a, it's a rom-com, you know, that's, that's who you really hit it off with. Yeah, they start taking your side in all the arguments that like, you don't know, like your spouse doesn't know something. How do you not know? You know, I wouldn't, I would know if this bombshell, if this knockout went to the Grand Canyon with me. I would have remembered forever. Yeah, and it was Matt. The end.

0:39:02 Matt: Client. Right. Yeah, one of my partners a while back actually told me she's from another country

0:39:14 Lydia: Oh, wow. Wow. That's crazy. Oh,

0:39:21 Matt: And she went through the marriage visa process and her lawyer hit on her within five minutes of their first meeting in front of her husband. Yeah, no, that wasn't me, but it is somebody I'm aware of. And I just thought that was quite a story. She thought it was funny. I don't think that's funny, but might as well laugh. But yeah, if you engage in anything that looks like marriage fraud, and again, that could be that there was a finding at some point that it's more likely than not that you got married for immigration purposes, that has become very strict.

And that one is a lifetime permanent bar from any immigrant visa, which means that your child can't sponsor you in the future if there's ever been a finding. And those are my least favorite cases. Those are really tough because you can imagine desperate situations where people don't want to go back. They don't really have enough for an asylum claim, but there's a good reason they don't want to go back. And somebody offers, and they pay the money, or they get arranged to a church group or whatever. Some crooked pastor will do it, and it happens. Right.

And the system's very aware of, especially the rings that are doing this. They kind of track them. And they have histories that they'll use the same medical exam. They'll use same doctor to do the medical exam, they'll us the same notario to do the translations, a notary, rather, so they can start to flag fake cases.

0:39:53 Lydia: Wow. Oh wow. And then it gets found out. Wow.

0:40:28 Thomas: What's the medical exam? What is that? Uh, you can't have cooties. I'm just trying to think

0:40:28 Lydia: Okay. Oh, you can't have a mental health condition. Okay, that's crazy.

0:40:29 Matt: Or if you clearly, oh, yeah, we didn't even talk about it. Now, I didn't raise anything that would be an issue in your medical exam, but you have to make sure you don't have a class A medical condition, you don' have an active case of tuberculosis, a mental health condition, like psychosis, schizophrenia. Not a really serious untreated one. If you're in treatment, it's okay. And you can't have current substance abuse addiction problem. It has to be rehabilitated or in treatment. I have an explanation.

0:40:43 Thomas: Of what the marriage one is. Yeah, oh wow. How do they define that? Hmm. Sure, yeah. I mean, fair enough.

0:40:57 Matt: Explanation, uh, so it's really the doctor is going to ask you at the interview, at the medical exam, you know, if you are currently... but the thing is, like, if you've had three drunk driving cases in the last year, then they can certainly ask a lot of questions about your alcohol use and, you know,

0:41:10 Thomas: Yeah, I wouldn't want. I mean, I'm not huge on immigration restrictions, but yeah, drunk driving is bad. And I'm

0:41:12 Matt: Maybe it's because your mom just died and you're going through a really bad time, maybe it's because you're actually an alcoholic, you know, that could really go either way, I think. Yeah, but it's not inadmissible. It's not inadmissible, that's like there's no, yep, right, like I said, cocaine possession

0:41:20 Thomas: Not that upset if we don't let drunk drivers in the country. Yeah, yeah. Whereas like some other dumb shit isn't admissible, right? Yeah. Oh, but DUI isn't? Come on. Like, again, it's like, we can agree or disagree on like the level of

0:41:29 Matt: Permanent lifetime ban. Possession. Nope. Not even anything. Not even a waiver. Yeah, yeah. Yep. Yeah. And it's a choice that you make. And I mean,

0:41:34 Lydia: Yeah, it's your existing citizenship, right? Like I mean, yeah

0:41:38 Thomas: Scrutiny we should be putting on stuff. But like, the priority is where you're like, are you crazy? Like, a DUI is so much more harmful than just recreational. Yeah, wow, that's crazy, just like day-to-day you're working

0:41:53 Matt: I know what you're saying. I don't think there's always explanations. Things happen. Sometimes there just isn't an explanation. But it's just amazing to me that I've worked with people that have a blood alcohol content of 0.25 or whatever, right? Just ridiculous amounts of alcohol in their blood. And that doesn't... Yeah, right. No, just in the police report. And they chose to drive in

0:42:07 Lydia: Oh,

0:42:08 Thomas: With, yeah, oh gosh, yeah, oh my god, you're totally right. I mean, you really, the theme is you really

0:42:13 Lydia: Wow.

0:42:16 Matt: That state. And somebody who's convicted for cocaine possession, which means you probably had a problem. There's a good chance if you're convicted of a drug possession offense, you probably at some point were suffering from addiction. So we're going to punish you for that even if you've been rehabilitated with no waiver. You can get a waiver for domestic violence. I mean, that's the state of things, right? I mean... So messed up. Yeah. Yeah? Oh,

0:42:31 Lydia: Wow. Wow. Sure. Yeah. I'm trying to remember. Were we asked about that as part? Probably. It was

0:42:35 Thomas: Can tell a lot about the country and its priorities in different times too, like throughout history, that that's a fascinating, it'd be cool to do a whole, like, history class on that, like you're, you're saying, yeah, that's, that's so interesting. Yeah, wow, well, forgive you for beating your wife

0:42:45 Matt: Oh, I love teaching the history of this. Yeah, there's plenty more to talk about. Yeah. It's great. I mean, it's awful, but I think people need to know that we have a system in which we're going to punish you for the rest of your life for an addiction, which you've rehabilitated. But we can take a look at you maybe if you've had multiple relationships where you've actually physically abused your partner. I think that's a great way to do it. I don't know if you're, I mean, you're probably not going to get that waiver if there's proof that you've done it to different people more than once. Right. Yeah, did you do it while Chinese? Yeah. You know, if it's just like a regular white rich guy beating his wife then you know maybe we can look the other way. But yeah, yeah, exactly. A couple of legal issues that we haven't talked about yet that came up in your interview. So we had put together this fact pattern about your divorce not quite being final at the time that you remarried. There is a requirement in immigration.

0:43:08 Thomas: But are you Chinese? Yeah, yeah, of course. Right this way, Senator. Yeah. I know. That's the marriage Police! Jesus! What is that? Hold on, we gotta... wow. Maybe wait that one out. Like, you guys gotta get

0:43:34 Matt: They're coming for us. Wow. You know, the construction had just stopped and this is what happens. That is just, yeah. So there's a requirement under immigration law that you have have to be free to marry. And the thing that is really obnoxious about this is that you would think the people who would determine whether or not you're free to marry would be, you know, the clerk when you go to get married. USCIS knows better. If your divorce is not final in a way that they, like, at the time that you got remarried. So basically, and you know, it's, it's true that the clerks often don't ask a lot of questions if you're presenting a divorce certificate, or sometimes people don't even mention they were married before. Some clerks are pretty lax about this. But you know, obviously it's bigamy if you get married while you're still married. I would think. Yeah, yeah, I mean, they definitely, they ask you, they ask if it's

0:43:41 Thomas: Get back to work. Yeah. Are you... does this mean like in a Jasmine from Aladdin sense, or like what's... I don't know who's... what's free to marry me. Oh god. I have no memory. I remember the room, but I don't

0:44:26 Lydia: Probably a question in like the paperwork that we did. Yeah, I remember the room and I remember like typing out what our name was going to be. That's all I remember. Yeah yeah exactly. Okay Okay. Yeah. Yeah, and you know what's funny is who's probably going to be behind a national

0:44:30 Thomas: Remember anything. What our name... we have one name. Oh yeah. Wow. We'll probably have that before we

0:44:40 Matt: Which marriage it is, right? And they rely on you to self-report, because obviously if you were married in Alaska, there's no way they could know that. There's no national marriage registry. So people, I'm sure, have lied about it all the time. Yeah, totally, totally, yeah, totally. The care that's

0:44:51 Thomas: We have a gun registry though. Or it'll be the Christians that are like making sure everyone's

0:44:58 Lydia: Marriage registry is going to like the Mormons, right? Because like they're the ones that track everybody after they've died. Yeah yeah. Thank you. Yeah you said there's like a like they call

0:45:04 Matt: Right, yeah, yeah. So it gets messy, because you know, if you didn't realize it, if you got got married during what they call the Nisi period here. I think it's called something else in many other places, but essentially, like, the temporary period that has to expire before it's a final divorce. They will actually make you get divorced and get remarried. It's really messy. And if they decide that your divorce in Brazil or the Dominican Republic or whatever is against public policy and it's too easy to get divorced, because there's famously, there used to be something called Dominican divorce. It feels very overbearing, very paternalistic. And like, honestly, like, in

0:45:05 Thomas: Not being a Christian, you know, against public policy. The country needs you to be married.

0:45:33 Thomas: Yeah. Lydia, close your ears. I don't even care about my marriage this much. Why do they care

0:45:38 Matt: In many cases, racist of like, your country's divorce wasn't good enough.

0:45:46 Thomas: About my wedding? Why do I care about it? I don't know. I'm not sure. I mean, I don't know. I don't care about my marriage so much. Anyway, Lydia, you can listen now.

0:45:48 Matt: It's a great way to deny a visa. Yeah. Dominican divorce. Yeah, that used to be a thing where,

0:45:52 Thomas: What oh man there should be a comedy that is like instead of the classic thing they did with the

0:45:53 Lydia: Call it a Dominican marriage, like a phrase for it? Dominican divorce. Okay. Okay, yeah.

0:45:59 Matt: So, you know, under family law, you have to have jurisdiction, proper jurisdiction for a divorce to be recognized, right? And if you have lived, for example, in Massachusetts for more than six months in marital union, and the cause for divorce happened in Massachusetts, you're supposed to get divorced in Massachusetts even if you got married in Brazil. That is not something that most people think of. That's right. A really common fact pattern I've seen is that people would

0:46:22 Thomas: Police, where the criminals like on the other side of the state lines, you know, well we can't do anything, he's right there. You know, do somebody who doesn't want to get a divorce be like, can't divorce me over here, we're at the... we went to that four corners thing, whatever those states are, and they're just like jumping around the corner, not in the same state, not in same state. Yeah. Texas, uh... Australia? I don't know. Tennessee?

0:46:31 Lydia: It's not your jurisdiction. Yeah. Was it Arizona, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado? No, it's not Texas.

0:46:49 Matt: Assume, I got married in Brazil, I'll get divorced in Brazil. You wouldn't think you'd have to do it in Massachusetts. So they'll hire Brazilian lawyers. Well, yeah, that's right, the cause

0:46:54 Lydia: I don't know. That seems like a pain, though. I feel like I wouldn't want to have to get on a plane to go get divorced. Let me just do it wherever I'm at. Yeah,

0:46:57 Thomas: Yeah, if you need a divorce, you need a divorce in every state and jurisdiction, like, you there's not like, "Well, we're pretty happy when we're over here, but like, just we gotta go back to where we're unhappy, because that's where the divorce will will take this is weird.

0:47:14 Lydia: Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Oh, wow. Weird. More evidence that you actually are divorced. Yeah, yeah.

0:47:17 Matt: For divorce, yes, when you isolate the exact metaphysical moment when you were divorced in in your mind. Yeah. Oh, USCIS officers do. Let me tell you. It is so obnoxious because, again,

0:47:23 Thomas: Who has time to think of all this?

0:47:32 Matt: As far as I'm concerned, these people don't want to be married anymore. They got divorced in Brazil. Who cares, right? But the argument actually mentioned Lydia jumping on a plane. You can in Brazil, you can't do this in a lot of other places, but you can get divorced without being in the country. So you can hire lawyers and have them do it in absentia, basically, as long as you both get notarized statements. And that's part of the problem for USCIS. It's like, well, I see you have a Brazilian divorce, that's against our public policy because we don't think that people should get divorced when they're not in the same place. And who cares, USCIS? It's good enough for

0:47:59 Thomas: Huh. I get that you can't get married in different places, because then you're supposed to be together.

0:48:00 Matt: Brazil. It's an entire country that does it that way. Right. Well, actually, it's funny you say

0:48:06 Thomas: But I would say being in different places is even more divorced, like that. Yeah, that's like if you were, you guys got together to get divorced, I don't even believe it. Why would you get together, you know? Ah, okay. Oh, we got married under Sharia law. Shit, we shouldn't have done that. But you know

0:48:18 Matt: That because getting married in different places is our next topic. We'll get there in a minute. But the divorce thing, though, I mean, it just kills me because the amount of effort that you're now talking about because of some paperwork, essentially, that you thought was fine from from your country, right? Now, I get it under Sharia law, you can say, I divorce you," three times and you're divorced. That's the law. Right? That's right. Yeah. We're trying to. Yeah, yeah.

0:48:30 Lydia: Mm-hmm. Yeah, just get ahead of the curve. Yeah, yeah, trendsetters.

0:48:38 Thomas: It's a different time. They're talking about, like, "Oh, Sharia law's taking over," and we're like, "What's that? That's a Sharia law thing." Yeah, that seems cool. We like being the woke nightmare that everybody, that the right thinks we are.

0:48:51 Matt: I mean, it does mean you have the easiest divorce on earth. You just have to say, I divorce you three times. That is Sharia. So obviously, that is against. Yes, exactly.

0:48:55 Thomas: Oh, wow.

0:48:56 Lydia: Like Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. Yeah, there would be a paper trail for Thomas for sure.

0:48:58 Thomas: Yeah.

0:48:59 Matt: Exactly. That I can see is against public policy, because generally in every state in America, you have to write it down. Like I get that. And it's way too easy to just say, yeah, well, I said those things, right? So now we're divorced. The idea though, that we just don't like the way

0:49:08 Thomas: To be fair, I'd have to write it down. Otherwise, I would forget we were divorced. Like, shit, weren't we?

0:49:13 Lydia: I don't want to be with them anymore.

0:49:14 Thomas: Weren't we- No, okay. I guess we were still together. Okay.

0:49:19 Matt: That your country handles divorce on paper. And there's no federal policy for what marriage is supposed to look like. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right. Right? It's not that complicated. I know. I

0:49:23 Thomas: What is the- What needs to be handled? I don't like- We are two people who don't want to be together. There's not a lot of science to that, like, what? Jeez. Oh yeah, oh yeah, ridiculous. Huh, that's nice. Yeah, you make them one be the boy

0:49:34 Matt: Know. And it's like, you can't get married federally. So what do they care? Like, there's no standard for it. Obviously, there was the other thing I want to talk about very quickly as we move on here is same sex marriages, obviously not a factor here. But fun I've ever had in my career was the year that Windsor came down. In 2013 was the year that the Defense of Marriage Act was finally struck down, because for years and years, I'd been working with couples, with people that had been together forever, like decades, and could not get married.

And it's really frustrating to watch kids who just met in college after a semester getting married, and then these people who've been living together, sharing their lives, have kids and houses together, can't get married and sponsor the other person. You've got people getting deported who are married. It's just ridiculous. Ridiculous. So I had so much fun. We had such a good time. I love working with the queer community and I always have.

And we just had the best time for a whole summer, like the summer of love, basically, of all these couples coming in and doing their marriage visas after all this time. Just so rewarding. As it is, I will say that I think USCIS has handled same-sex marriage very well. I know someone who was in the room when they're having these conversations and someone actually raised their hand and was like, well, how are we supposed to know if two gay people are married?

And the supervisor looked at him and was Like, how do you usually do it? It. How do you know that two straight people are married? Yeah. I mean, all the questions,

0:49:40 Lydia: Yeah, okay, that's, yeah, cohabitate right in front of you, like you would do with every relationship.

0:50:49 Thomas: And one be the girl right in front of you. I don't know, what, they're standing next to each other, I don't even, yeah, oh right, yeah, the more, yeah, the more platonic version, that's a big tell. I did

0:50:56 Lydia: Relationship. Yeah, weird. Are they holding hands, like interlacing fingers, or are they holding hands and cupping them? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:51:04 Matt: Right. Presumably all the question I asked you guys could be asked of two men or two women together or two people of any gender. So yeah, that's an interesting little detail that doesn't apply here. The other thing I want to talk about was, so Thomas mentioned proxy marriage is essentially a marriage where you have somebody standing in for the other person who is usually into proxy marriage is going to be for someone who's deployed overseas. And you can imagine this circumstance. And there was a really unfortunate case that it worked out in the end, but there was, I remember this from 2002, Hataru Fershki, I just looked her up. This man was just finding out he was going to be deployed to a combat zone in Iraq. And so he married his longtime girlfriend with whom he had a child and she's from Japan. And they did a proxy marriage, which is pretty normal in the military. And he, cause he wanted to be sure that she would Yeah, that's right. I'm gay married now. Yeah. It's invalid. That's right, that is right.

0:51:27 Thomas: Oh, okay. It turns out you accidentally marry whoever the proxy person was like, "Wait, no." Oh no, that would be the way that you get out of it in this comedy. You'd be like, "Oh," and then it's like, "Wait a minute, same sex, they won't let us be married," you know, like that, we use the bigotry against them.

0:52:08 Lydia: Yeah, oh geez, no way, wow. Well, since, since they were married, yeah, yeah, wow. When was this?

0:52:09 Matt: But yeah, I mean, obviously, proxy marriages are a long-standing tradition in the military for the very obvious reason that you want your family to get taken care of if it's somebody that you've been with for a while, and you just didn't get around to actually marrying them. You don't want to go into combat wondering if they're going to get the benefits. So unfortunately, he was killed in action pretty quickly after deploying. And so she's left with a one-year-old child, his child, and they can't get a marriage visa because they have not consummated the marriage. Think about that, about the absurdity. This is like a bad joke. Well, I mean, they hadn't

0:52:37 Thomas: That is, how would you know, and whose business is it? Oh, they'd never

0:52:44 Matt: Consummating the marriage because they hadn't been in the same place. They'd been in different sides of the world. Yep. Since marriage. Nope. There's no exceptions. And I mean it's so stupid.

0:52:47 Thomas: Oh, because you have to have been, when you were, cyber doesn't, okay. Yeah, yeah, I didn't even think about that because I'm dumb. Yeah, no, where do you think

0:52:55 Lydia: Okay, yeah, unbelievable.

0:52:57 Matt: So it was fixed in 2010. This all happened during the Iraq war, so presumably beginning of the the century here. But yeah, I mean, it really brought out the absurdity of it because she's literally holding his child in her arms while she's talking about this. And you're going to say they didn't consummate the marriage, right? I mean it's just so stupid. Yeah. Well, you may

0:53:16 Thomas: This thing came from? I mean, we weren't married, but like, fine, whatever. Yeah, what meaning does

0:53:17 Lydia: We consummated our relationship at that point, I guess. Yeah, all the timing about when you have sex.

0:53:24 Thomas: That have if you do, okay, I don't know if anything, if you have sex and have a kid and then make the

0:53:27 Matt: Not be surprised. Exactly. That's right. Bigger commitment. Yeah, yeah. But you won't be surprised

0:53:28 Lydia: Yeah, that's such like an outdated sort of idea of like what actually constitutes like a real relationship. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, right. God, that's so gross. That's honestly like the

0:53:38 Thomas: Decision to get married after that, you should be more married. That counts more than if you, you do this stupid stereotypical Christian thing of like, you're a virgin and then you get married. You're not married if you're virgin and you get marriage. Sorry, this is, this is me, I'm, this is my rules, Thomas world. If you two are virgins when you get married, you're going to get married, married, you're not married yet until you have sex. That's my new regime, because you don't even know about each other. But these people had a baby before they got married, come on. Oh wow, yeah.

0:54:07 Matt: To learn. The origin, like pretty much everything we're talking about, the origin is 19th century racism because there was this concept of picture brides that men, Japanese and Chinese laborers because they weren't allowed to bring women. And because basically they already excluded almost all Chinese women because they assumed they were sex workers. And sex work, as we discussed before, was one of the original bars to coming to the country. And so they would have this sort of picture bride system, which is actually very much like what a lot of American American men do today where they find a woman online and like her picture and invite her to come marry him, right? So they basically, they said, if you're going to do this and have a proxy marriage, because it was possible that they could do that at the time, you're gonna have to make it real. It's not real until you get here. And so, yeah, right, exactly. It is. Since the proxy

0:54:48 Thomas: Right in front of me right now. You guys are gonna have to make it real. Well, so you're saying they had to be, so it was like you couldn't get them to the country without having consummated, and that was a way to make sure people weren't doing mail order bride stuff, or am I not getting it?

0:54:53 Lydia: Creepiest thing. Do they have rooms available like like right when you get there that you can just

0:55:05 Matt: Marriage is not the basis for a visa until you've actually met, until you, until we've been in the same room and consummated, right. Even if you've met before. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. At the port.

0:55:07 Thomas: Okay, so, okay, I think that's kind of what I'm saying. Yeah.

0:55:15 Lydia: Go have sex real fast? Yeah it's like like in prison right they have like those special

0:55:17 Thomas: Yeah, probably. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there's the federal cuck chair rule that they do have to sit

0:55:19 Matt: A trailer. Yeah, totally. Yeah. The consummation thing. I mean, it's kind of fun to talk about,

0:55:24 Lydia: And I'm sorry. Like, yeah, I mean, in. But like in this day and age, it's honestly. Yeah, every every hotel room has a Gideon's Bible and the cuck chair. Yep. Yep, standard. Yeah. It's like a weird self-flagellation sort of situation.

0:55:27 Matt: But I mean think about Griswold v. Connecticut, right? The case where we get this idea of the right to privacy, which is about marriage, right. It was about contraception and the idea that the government shouldn't be interfering with your marriage and your decisions. And this idea that the government gets to come in and say, whether or not you have properly consummated your marriage can get pretty weird, as you can imagine. I've always said that USCIS definition of marriage

0:55:53 Thomas: That's why every hotel room has one, actually. You didn't know that. That's where it comes from. Federal cuck chair law. Yeah, it's old time. You're supposed to read the Bible while you're in the federal cuck chair, but nobody does that anymore, like for the most part. Yeah, no one even really remembers that that's where it came from, but it is. It is. Look it up.

0:56:12 Lydia: Situation. Okay, so this is also like infuriating, because, you know, the year is 2026 and sexual orientation exists on a wide spectrum, right? So all of our asexual friends, you know, which is also a spectrum itself, there are some people who do not engage in sex, and so you are saying that that their marriage is not real because they won't do the thing that's actually like part of their identity, which is so offensive. Yeah, yeah, yep, yep, so weird. Yeah, oh, just like super transactional.

0:56:38 Thomas: And I feel like the ultimate goal of all these white Christians is to eventually be a sexless marriage anyway. Like they should, you know, the ideal is you have sex exactly the number of times that you have kids and then you never talk to each other again. That's their version of marriage. So what the hell? They're just, they should be cool with it.

0:57:00 Matt: Is like the most 50s white picket fence, two and a half kids, two cars. They expect it to line up with their heteronormative ideas of what marriage is. And there are a lot of ways to be married and and a lot of different things you can do within a marriage. And that's interesting. There's a 1968 case called Matter of Peterson that I went back and read. And I have to wonder how these facts would be received today. But it was an 80-year-old man who married a 53-year old woman. And their agreement was, I need a housekeeper.

And she wanted a place to live. And that was the marriage. That was the basis for the marriage, yeah. And their agreement was that they would not be having sex. They would be sleeping in separate places, and they would just not have a sexual relationship. But they actually really liked each other, yeah, basically. Well, in the 50s, that's what marriage is, right? So, sure. They concluded the case by saying, essentially, the reasons for the marriage appear to be far sounder than exist for most marriages, which, I mean, literally, you know, he's out of work and has an illness and she's taking care of

0:57:06 Thomas: Yeah.

0:57:31 Lydia: And stuff. Yeah, oh wow, wow. Yeah, it's honestly, yeah, incredibly invasive, incredibly invasive.

0:57:34 Thomas: So you have an employment agreement. That's not really. Oh, okay. Well, some, some employers and employees like each other.

0:57:44 Thomas: I don't know why this is even a marriage thing. Yeah, that's great.

0:57:58 Matt: Him as his housekeeper. And it sounds like, you know, they actually like each other. But they said, "We regard the fact that parties sleep in separate rooms, that have not had sexual intercourse, insignificant in view of the evidence showing that there was an intended, valid, and lasting marital relationship, which has continued for over two years." It's very progressive of the board in 1968, actually. Yeah, exactly. Right. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Right? When was the last time?

0:58:16 Thomas: But why is that even in a document? No, that shouldn't be anywhere near a... The court has considered whether or not they've boned. And I was like, what are you doing? It's so funny.

0:58:31 Lydia: Like, okay, you're having sex? What kind of sex are you having? Like, how many times have you had? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What? No, no. Oh my God, oh my God. What? Yeah, yeah. Let me ask these questions from

0:58:37 Matt: Yeah, no, no. Totally. And I will say, this has only ever come up once in a marriage interview. I'll tell you this in a moment. But generally speaking, yeah, I mean, the reason it was coming up to an appeal is because they had decided, even though there's no strict requirement for consummation, if we're not talking about a proxy marriage, this person had decided it wasn't a it wasn't a marriage because they both said they weren't having sex.

And the board of immigration appeals in 1968 disagreed with that. And, you know, I think a lot of immigration attorneys have it in their head that the marriages have to be consummated. It's not exactly true, but obviously they do see sex as like something, you Know, that is in a normal relationship as they see it. Right. And it is in the majority of marriages when they're getting started.

But I will say that the one time it came up for me was there was an older man and a younger woman. There was a pretty big age gap. And you know it was kind of a, I Think potentially a similar arrangement where she was looking after the house and, you know, he wanted company. And we had two interviewers for this one.

And ostensibly it was because there was a trainee and there was a supervisor, but I think it was really a good cop, bad cop, because the supervisor really looked like an FBI agent. Like you would think he was an FBI agen, just saw him on the street. And he started doing like FBI interrogation of my client. And at one point, and my client is like a very sort of traditional macho Latino man. And, you Know, I think he's in his late seventies.

And at one point, the interviewer asks him, when did you first have sex with your wife? And the guy just, without even a pause, just shoots back, I don't know, when was the last time you fucked your wife. And it's the first time in my entire, it's my only crime that I can think of in my entire career that I actually reached over and touched my client. I put my hand on his shoulder, I pulled him back a little, and I said, just take a breath.

I said officer, sorry about that. Can we rephrase? Because they wanted to establish that at some point they'd actually had relations. And, you know, I had to object and say, this isn't really relevant to the fact that they're testifying about this marriage. They live together. It's not required. And I don't think that my client should have to sit here and testify about their sex lives. And they basically backed off and accepted that. I'd never had it come up before.

People are always worried they're going to get asked about it. And officers have told me before that people will volunteer amateur porn just to prove it, if you want to see some.

1:00:40 Thomas: What?

1:00:43 Matt: Yeah. And people, I swear, I know more than one USCIS officer, and they've told me that in the packages they review, sometimes people will include things they really should not be including. Yeah, just to prove it. Because if they're filing without a lawyer, they just get creative. Send the record. I don't want to pierce the veil of a USCIS office, especially under

1:00:43 Thomas: Oh, my God.

1:01:01 Thomas: How creative.

1:01:06 Lydia: My cuck chair in the hotel room. Okay, so yeah, what, what in the world is the policy for, like, like, do they destroy that? Does it get filed?

1:01:15 Thomas: These are the important questions.

1:01:15 Lydia: Like, what? I'm in shock right now.

1:01:19 Thomas: These are HR questions. I don't know if these are like questions for Matt.

1:01:19 Lydia: Well, like, do, like do they look at it? Do they like, like the second they recognize what it is, do they close, like what, what do they do? What do you do? I want to know if Matt knows. Yeah.

1:01:36 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, that ruins my substitute Pornhub idea. Like if everybody just submits their,

1:01:36 Matt: Of these circumstances. But I will say that when you file something with USCIS, it's going to go in the record. As far as I know, they're not going to censor it or cut it out just because it's amateur porn, but it can't be FOIAed. Nobody else is ever going to see it. So I guess there's that.

1:01:48 Lydia: That's still crazy though.

1:01:49 Matt: Yeah. Wow. That's very creative. But generally, you should not be concerned that you're going to

1:01:54 Thomas: Like they have to take it, rules say. And then it's like on a government website and we turn government them into Pornhub like it's like PornHub.gov yeah but wow why do they have the

1:01:56 Lydia: And then we just like have to, yeah, FOIA it once every month to have things released. Yeah.

1:02:12 Matt: Be asked about your sex life in a marriage interview. And of course, when you walk in with multiple birth certificates that have you listed as the parents, you're just not going to be asked at all. They're going assume that that is for real and that you have consummated the marriage at least a couple of times. That's how that works. So that is just an interesting little wrinkle. I think that people are often very concerned about, and I get it. I mean, it's the government. You don't want them asking about your private life. I will mention too, In the course of a marriage interview, they have the right to ask to see your phone if they just want to look at your phone. And I definitely had a situation in which I had a very attractive female client and the officer asked to look at her phone and she was very uncomfortable giving it up. And he was looking through her texts with her boyfriend. And she's told me after that she was really uncomfortable with that given what was in their photos and texts. It's your benefit, right?

1:02:30 Lydia: No, no, wow. Yeah. Oh my god, gross. Uh-huh. Yeah.

1:02:52 Thomas: Right to do that. Jesus Christ. So they're looking for like, if it turns out I'm like, okay Lydia,

1:02:54 Matt: Right? You're the one applying for it. They can use it against you if you don't want to give up your phone. And certainly she could have. And I should have, I didn't expect this because it hadn't happened in a long time. And it was really out of nowhere. It was very quick. I did kind of look at her and say, you don'T have to, but you know, she's just want to get over with. And there was like a really uncomfortable long time where he sat there.

It was very unprofessional. He definitely saw things he wasn't supposed to see. And it was just current interest. Like there couldn't have been anything else, but that's fair. That's very rare. Typically when that happens, it's they'll look at the text and it'll be the kinds of texts you would expect back and forth of like, can you grab some eggs on the way home or whatever? And obviously not every couple texts all the time, but most people do at least check in with each other by text.

So you'd expect that in a regular marriage. But because you're applying for the benefit, it's not like you have to get a search warrant. They can voluntarily hand over your phone and they can take a look to see if you communicate the way couples are supposed to communicate. Right. Yeah. Or yeah, you're texting

1:03:42 Thomas: Here's the payment for, um, pretending to be married to me this, this whole time. They're expecting to find that or something. Yeah, I'd be like, yeah, like quite a bit, most of it. Yeah.

1:03:50 Matt: Her parents and being like, where's this payment this month? What's going on? Yeah. Honestly, every time that I've had that happen, the officer will take a moment and ask, is there anything on your phone that you don't want me to see? Or if I'm going to look at your text, will I see things that are inappropriate or that you don't want me to see or whatever. And honestly, if you say yes, that's more evidence of the marriage. Yeah. My whole phone. Thanks. But to me, that's just evidence of marriage, right? Like if you are sending sexy stuff back and forth, you're probably married, but disappearing messages and signal are my recommendation. You should always use disappearing messages on signal anyway. But anyway, that is the fun stuff with consummation. We should talk about a few more things before we close out here. I mentioned, I think in passing, I mentioned the polygamy bar and that is kind of an interesting one because that one, yeah,

1:04:10 Thomas: What do you guys use your phones for? Yeah. I love going there.

1:04:34 Thomas: My favorite hang.

1:04:34 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. What'd you put? Kind of a, kind of a tricky questionnaire, don't you think?

1:04:35 Matt: Yeah. Yeah. As we've been talking about, the origins of pretty much everything, the worst parts of immigration law and the stuff that is the most pernicious and the stuff that punishes people the worst are almost all 19th century anti-Chinese racism. And this is no exception. They were obsessed with the idea that Chinese people didn't practice monogamy because they didn't really the way that Christians understand monogomy and that the laborers were going to bring over concubines as it was where they use.

And that was more of like a place in Chinese society of women who weren't your wife, and they're just a little more open about sexuality. As I understand it, I'm not an expert in 19th century Chinese culture, but there's this obsession with the idea that Chinese people could not conform themselves to Christian conduct, and this was one of those things, that they were going to be polygamous. So the polygamy bar still exists.

There's no real definition of it, but the real understanding is that it really only applies if you're coming from a country or culture where polygomy is practiced, especially if it's legal, right? There's lots of countries in the world where you can marry more than one person. And so So if you are married to more than one person, you have to pick one. Essentially, I think they basically make you go with the first one.

The polygamy bar is interesting because it is really, it's outdated in some ways, but it's also current in many countries because there are lots of places where you can marry more than One person that you can legally on your marriage certificate indicate that you intend to marry another person or that you are marriage to another person because their law permits them. You know, I've seen in lots of countries, you can actually specify upfront whether or not you intend this to be a monogamous marriage. Yeah.

1:05:54 Thomas: Must've made for some awkward moments. Felt filling up.

1:05:55 Matt: Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing is too, when people are talking about Windsor and

1:05:56 Thomas: Oh, you're just reading off. We're definitely putting you here. I know. That's what I was thinking, too.

1:06:15 Matt: Obergefell being a slippery slope, they're not wrong. It is true that we could redefine marriage to be any number of consenting adults. There's no reason at this point it can't be that way. So if this ever happens, if the Supreme Court is going to reconsider monogamy as a requirement for marriage, we're going to have a very interesting situation with marriage visas because suddenly you'll be able to bring over five wives from Saudi Arabia. And I don't think the system's going to want that or like that. If you look at the map of countries where polygamy is legal, it's not places that the U.S. likes to receive immigrants from. Yeah, I've been wondering.

1:06:24 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that doesn't sound great. I'm sure there's some way to be chill about that, but also chill about other things.

1:06:41 Lydia: Right. Yeah, some sort of middle ground or something. Yeah yeah. Yeah exactly.

1:06:46 Thomas: I don't, I just love how, you know, a lot of what we've talked about is how arcane the system is and how left over from, like, racisms that truly I don't even understand anymore.

1:06:55 Matt: Yes. Or remember where they came from.

1:06:56 Thomas: Like, I'm sure there's some avid racists somewhere who keep up, you know, with like bigotry monthly or whatever.

1:06:57 Matt: Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, you think about something called a crime involving moral turpitude,

1:07:02 Thomas: And they're they're really like they have the archive of like, oh, yes, the Chinese of the 19th. And it's like, I don't even know what you're talking about, but that's still in like codified. Right. So it's Like, is it just because we never reform these things or if we do, it's sort of just adding on. I know we've kind of already touched on that, but don't we need like a comprehensive rehaul of this system to get all this dumb garbage out of there? Yeah. Nobody knows what turpitude is, let alone moral turpitude. Yes, exactly. And, and it's, like, we're still

1:07:28 Matt: To change gears for a second, like nobody knows what moral turpitude is, right? And that's, Right. That's the law. And that's been the law since 1868. Right, exactly. Most people think, but yeah, right, it's still in there. Yeah, still a question you have to answer. Could have been

1:07:39 Lydia: Exactly. Interesting. So you're saying that you think it'll be like spillover into polyamory just because it's like, like, even if there's no legal benefit on the marital side, you think it'll in addition to. Yeah. Oh, interesting.

1:07:42 Thomas: Still asking whether people were part of the Nazi regime, right? Isn't that one of them, like, yep, I don't think we need to ask that anymore. That'd be, that'd, and that was really cute

1:07:51 Matt: A five-year-old concentration camp guard, I guess, but could have happened. But you know, the polygamy bar serves a purpose in the sense that as a matter of public policy, we don't recognize people who are legally married to more than one person in any state, and the federal government doesn't recognize them either, and there are people that are legally married to more than one person out in the world, so we need you to swear that you're going to remain married to this person that you are marrying, that you aren't trying to bring other people over, and that you don't intend to practice polygamy in the United States.

And that gets a little hairy when we're talking of potentially. And this has not really been litigated. And I would be happy to take the test case, but nobody really seems to want to do it because technically, kind of a gray area. But the polygamy bar probably also applies to anybody who intends to live in marital union with more than one person, which is a lot of us at this point. So I think that that could get messy.

Right now, it is understood in a very racist way to mean that the polygamy bar really only applies to people coming from countries and cultures where polygamy is traditionally practiced. That's weird. I mean, if you're talking about the fact that people might, might have the intent who are from Canada, where it's not traditionally practiced. But at the moment, if they find out that you have a girlfriend, you know, as a man, and you're going through this process, then they'll assume you're not really married, right? They'll assume that, right,

1:09:08 Thomas: And well, just to reset, this is all for trying to get a marriage visa thingy, right? Or whatever. Is that what you call it? Look, this is a sacred bond between one man, one woman, and one federal

1:09:15 Matt: But I'm also talking about the grounds of inadmissibility that apply after they find that you are legally married, so they could find that this is a lawful marriage, and then, you know, it turns out you're actually polygamous. But yeah, at the same time, if you're just at that stage where they're looking at the validity of the marriage, or they find out that they are actively seeing somebody else, or even that you have agreed that you don't have to be sexually monogamous, that can still be used hard against you, and it can still be the basis of a denial, even if there's no doubt that it's a consensual understanding that you have between you. And that's a real problem. Yeah, that's right.

1:09:44 Thomas: Culture, and if I see you with a different man or woman while I'm in my federal culture, I don't know

1:09:46 Lydia: Interesting, yeah, it feels like it's a matter of time, right, like yeah

1:09:47 Matt: That's right, yeah. No, that that's the shape of it. It's messy, and we should at least update

1:09:50 Thomas: What I'm gonna do, I mean they should be pretty familiar with it since they fucked every American

1:09:58 Matt: That part to make it clear that people don't have to hide, you know, if they're in polyamorous relationships. But that's not going to happen. That's never going to happened. I shouldn't say never. The Supreme Court's going to hear about it at some point, I think, and I think it'll eventually have to be modified. But yeah, yeah. Because people should be able to consensually engage in the relationships they want to engage in. Very good, very good. I just think that the

1:10:20 Thomas: At once, but don't, yeah, yeah, it makes it kind of trickier, yeah, now I was gonna ask in the same way

1:10:23 Lydia: Yeah, wow, I just like talking about stuff

1:10:25 Matt: Law of marriage is particularly fascinating around this stuff. And like I said, the ways the government gets to get involved and that they never would otherwise in any other situation, it's not great, but it's fun to talk about. This was fairly typical. There was, like I said, a lot of stuff we didn't touch on that I didn't really want to bring out in a public podcast scenario, but I think you got a very good idea. And anybody listening can basically expect that kind of thing. Also, I really like it when they jump around the way that I was, you might've noticed like the complete randomness of interrogation tactics. Some of the trickier ones will do that. They generally are working from like an internal sort of list that they're working down. Yeah. If they feel like you're trying to evade a question, they will start to

1:11:06 Thomas: That I never had to do the deposition, but I was, you know, sort of getting getting my mindset for for that. And there's a whole strategy to that, I think, and where I'm making it up based on how many we've kind of covered, like it does seem like there's ways to kind of filibuster in a way that like is more constructive. Now that's a different scenario. I was almost considering asking you that, like, is it useful to waste time and provide non-answers or is it just going to be the kind of thing where it's like, they need to know this and they're going to get mad at you? Right. I was going to say, well, what about the opposite? Like if you were just giving

1:11:35 Matt: Get pretty irritated. Or if you're giving really long winded answers, which some people just can't help themselves yeah, that's what I'd recommend, yeah, very much like testimony, answer the question

1:11:41 Thomas: Super short answers, you know, is that okay, and it's just kind of, is that like, to a certain extent, is that what you want to do, to not volunteer too much? Yeah, yeah, part of that is I have to tell

1:11:52 Matt: Being asked, like when I asked you about when your relationship became official and you told a nice story about, you know, and it was, it basically, to remember, I got it, yeah, yeah, and work it out

1:11:59 Thomas: A story to be able to remember, yeah, no, otherwise I could sit there in silence for, you know, 10 minutes and be like going to go to a fugue state while they're like, hold on, I'm getting there, the date was, oh yeah, no, yeah.

1:12:12 Lydia: Yeah yeah

1:12:13 Matt: It's funny, I actually I was thinking about my experience while I was asking you these questions, because like I, I'm so used to not being rude to you, so like I would have actually, like, because I could have easily jumped in and be like, sir, the question was, when did your relationship become official, right? When you're going on this whole story.

1:12:26 Lydia: Yeah. No. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's such a pain. Mm. Right, right. Wow. Mm hmm. Oh

1:12:27 Thomas: Yeah, you're not cut out for this work, Matt.

1:12:29 Matt: Yeah, well, not with you guys, because I actually enjoy hearing your stories. So, you know, genuinely, I didn't factor in the fact that I'd actually enjoy hearing about how you got together. Didn't know any of that. So that was fun. Their position is, you're not going to be able to do that. Unlike a deposition where you're being dragged in because you're being sued or suing, in this case, you are the one who applied for the benefit.

1:12:34 Thomas: Turns out Matt's a total asshole in other situations.

1:12:50 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, you are trying to, yeah that's fair.

1:12:50 Matt: So you're coming in, it's your story to tell. And if you don't want to answer really critical stuff, or you say you can't remember, or don't want to, for whatever reason, talk about it, that will be used against you. Yeah. Yep. And you have paid $690 for the visa. You've paid $1,440. No, hold on. I can't keep

1:12:53 Thomas: Yeah, that is a whole different story where you're trying to get something versus you're being dragged into court.

1:13:04 Thomas: That's fair, yeah you started going into the like World Trade Center height that they did.

1:13:12 Matt: Numbers in my head. That's not the current number. Yeah. Right, right. Well, the reason I'm hesitating

1:13:18 Thomas: It, no, I'm just kidding, 1776 the feet, no, I don't know, what it would be funny if they made it like a number like a Trump or a or a U.S. number for the fee like 1776 dollars, oh sure, of the fees

1:13:33 Matt: Is because there has been an inflation, like the stupid big bill authorized inflation raises, but it is actually still 1440. Yeah. Yes. So like it's super annoying. Some of them are going up by a couple of dollars at a time, which means you can get it rejected if it's the wrong amount. It's very annoying by a few dollars. Yeah, oh yeah. There's so many ways to get it projected. If you apply for employment authorization, the marriage visa, the residency authorization, and then also travel authorization, because you can't leave the country unless they give you permission while this case is pending. And if you do, you abandon the whole thing. So all of that alone together is more than $3,000. So you've already paid that much. That's a great question.

1:13:41 Thomas: Oh wow, yeah, oh my god, that's ridiculous, oh wow, oh, so was it bad that we had traveled out of the Country, would that have been a no-no? Okay, yeah, it's probably unrealistic, isn't it, the time frame

1:14:11 Matt: For purposes of this, I was assuming that you filed maybe after you got back in November, whatever. Because actually, I got to say, we're getting interviews within, yeah, the one I did today was filed not that long ago, December or whatever. It is really strange. Like recently, I think they cleared a backlog because they've really been speeding along. And this is per office, obviously. And I'll go to Boston and Lawrence and New Hampshire. Those are massively

1:14:17 Thomas: Was it pretty quick? Oh, weird, oh, okay, I thought it was all bogged down or whatever, yeah, well, and it Matters what it is, so this isn't like asylum or whatever, where that's still backed up a lot or doesn't exist. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Wow. Oh, like, like to COVID, you're saying? Sorry, I was trying

1:14:37 Matt: Passively backlogged. Yeah. Yeah, it really depends on the field office, as I understand it. And they were kind of shipping some of these cases around the different field offices. During the pandemic, they actually stopped doing initial marriage interviews for a lot of cases like yours, where it's just immediately obvious when you look at the papers. So you could have skipped that. But they are bringing people in for the second round for the if you only had a two year card, you have to remove the conditions I was telling you about up front. So that's been happening more and more. But I did think, honestly, it was good that they waived the marriage interviews, especially because I was very concerned about going in public with the people around me potentially being exposed. And then they kept doing it through the Biden administration. Yeah, right, yeah. But they kept waiving these interviews during the Biden ministration, which is kind of a little known fact that a lot of cases where if you documented them well enough, they just wouldn't have a marriage interview. I still can't believe that happened, but it did. Yeah.

1:15:13 Thomas: To catch up with your thought process here. Huh? And I took that to mean they just shit out of luck, but you're seeing they wouldn't even bother with the, the part where they're trying to grill you about whether or not it's real. Oh, really? Oh, that's got to be fun, man. Now I want to write, like, a play

1:15:32 Matt: There was a period there. But for those two-year cases, they're still going to bring in two years later to see how it's going. And even if you've separated, you can explain that. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh. You could do that. And then naturalization. Because there's three interviews you have to go to. So that would be a three-act play. Yes. Because if you worked in some... Oh, man. There's a story here. Yeah, you're onto something. Because you could really get into some of the weird convoluted things that can happen in immigration stuff.

1:15:33 Lydia: Wow. Oh I like that. Yeah a three act play. Yeah Oh with all of our time you guys this

1:15:42 Thomas: Or a movie that just takes place with, within these interviews, you know? It's like two years later, it's like Marriage Story, but yeah, yeah. But what's the arc though, you know? We'll work on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But are we trying to do, yeah, are we try, yeah, are you trying to write a movie

1:16:05 Matt: Stuff. No, it'd be a rom-com or a drama. It could be a drama, a dram-com. I could definitely see a

1:16:08 Lydia: Is a great idea. If you guys write this play then and then we're the rights holder and

1:16:09 Thomas: Are we're trying to a law movie or a rom-com or a, you know, a romcom? Okay. But so then if it's a, a rom-com, you gotta, you can't end up with the person you went in with, you know, you gotta, there's gotta be a switching of, like, like I said, there is the interviewers on your side of all the arguments, I think, is where we go with it. Okay, we will work on it, everybody. Wow, yeah, yeah, here we go. Get the word out about the immigration system,

1:16:28 Matt: Three-act play with three interviews. That would be pretty sweet, actually. And incidentally, in the course of it, you're telling the entire story of your relationship history and all the weird stuff that happened intertwined with your immigration history. Yeah. I think it's good for

1:16:42 Lydia: And people could actually produce this play around the country. Yeah. Here we go. Yep.

1:16:50 Matt: People to know. And I like to try to demystify as much as possible what you're looking at when you go in. And, I will say, I have had the odd interviewer once in a while. This doesn't happen anymore. But sometimes they'll just bring them in together, talk to them for 30 seconds, 60 seconds, whatever, and just be like, yeah, you guys seem right. That has happened before.

1:17:05 Lydia: Mm.

1:17:06 Thomas: Okay, I thought you were going to tell me the opposite, they are like, meh, no go, oh

1:17:07 Matt: Yeah, no, no. I never had anything denied that quickly. And they hold their cards pretty close, but you can tell if an interview did not go well and if you're going to get a request for evidence. So the request for evidence is a written follow-up that comes in saying, here's some discrepancies we noticed. Can you explain these? And excuse me, a notice of intent to deny. A request for evidence would be if you left out some important evidence like your criminal records, But the notice of intent to deny takes you through the issues they had. And I've seen these go like 15 pages single spaced of like, here's everything that went wrong. And sometimes it's very explainable. Like you can imagine, so Thanksgiving dinner, it turns out they have both the traditional Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving dinner featuring the food from where they're from. So they answered the question about their food and the other person answered that they

1:17:11 Thomas: Oh, good.

1:17:22 Lydia: Mm. Oh, wow.

1:17:46 Thomas: Oh, plus there's a different Thanksgiving in Canada, right?

1:17:48 Matt: Had turkey. And that sounds really weird, right? Like just, you know, but you can explain it if you sit down and take people through it and you can do a follow-up sworn statement.

1:17:56 Thomas: It's a difference. It's different week.

1:17:57 Matt: That's true. I don't know if it's the same name, but right.

1:17:57 Thomas: Yeah, it could have been all kinds of things. I don't know what they do for it, but sure.

1:18:00 Matt: Right. But it is amazing all the different ways that the same people can tell the story differently who were there, right? And just can emphasize different things like the Grand Canyon or when was the last time your wife went to church, but you don't realize because there's one day that you overslept and she went without you and came back and she never even told you, right?

1:18:05 Thomas: Oh, God. Yeah. Never.

1:18:16 Matt: That kind of stuff. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So there's just a lot of room for misunderstanding, but the good ones can usually tell the difference between people who are nervous and maybe just like not quite getting things right and people who were just unable to explain themselves, that have just weird stuff that can't be edited. Oh, yeah. I have always wondered if it's possible

1:18:17 Lydia: Yeah. Mm.

1:18:18 Thomas: You're out. Yeah. Okay.

1:18:31 Lydia: It's a drama.

1:18:31 Thomas: I think the play should be actually, because there's so much more political we need to get into. I think maybe the play is more about these agents, and then just the couples and the the marriage interviews are part of the sprinkling in of the fun. You could have the one that's the total bogus one you could have, you know, for comedy purposes. Yeah. Yeah, so you can sprinkle those in different interviews. I think that's probably the better way to go. We'll workshop it.

1:18:44 Lydia: Oh, interesting. Like a workplace comedy.

1:18:56 Matt: To do a serialized TV show about the immigration system, like they do with all the cop shows. Yeah,

1:18:56 Thomas: There's, God, there really needs to be. It's the show that needs to happen. Like, when you say plausible, there's, you know, good writers could make anything amazing,

1:19:04 Lydia: Mm-hmm.

1:19:05 Matt: Yeah, right. Yeah. Totally. No, I have also always thought there has to be a way to do it,

1:19:05 Lydia: Mm-huh.

1:19:09 Thomas: Good actors, good directors, but it's just, it's like the interest, you know, nobody does it. It's like, nobody thinks it's worth it, but it's like with how many misconceptions there are, we talk about legal misconceptions, but I mean, the immigration system, as, as I've learned, you know, doing the show with you and stuff, it's, like, people are just so wrong about what it is, you know, and it's just, I wish there was a popular outlet for that, and we'll have to be the change we want to see in the world. Oh, yeah, no, because I'm not, if, if he wrote one, I'm not even counting it. Yeah, yeah. Oh right, yeah yeah. No, we'll do a play for an audience of

1:19:27 Lydia: Nobody tell Aaron Sorkin. Because then you won't touch it. Yeah. Yeah. Mm.

1:19:39 Matt: Because so much of this job is just very boring, to be honest, on paper, objectively. It's important to me, and it matters to me. I know it matters for them, but a lot of it is just making sure that details are correct and that everything matches up and adds up and is a good filing. But it's kind of like that expression about war, about how it's like weeks of boredom punctuated by 90 seconds of terror or whatever, right? There are really amazing dramatic stories in here and things that happen, but you can't do a TV show about immigration court. That just isn't going to be a good TV show. Yeah. There's got to be way. Yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah I'm going to say I'm

1:20:00 Lydia: Oh, good.

1:20:11 Thomas: 12 people who actually have the patience to learn something. Yeah, you know, well, this was fun. Yeah. Yes.

1:20:18 Matt: Going to approve this case. I'm recommending for approval. We'll see what the supervisor says. Is. Yeah. I still have some questions about your... You've made it through. And I could have made that

1:20:22 Thomas: Awesome. Haha. Suck it, Nickelback sucks. Woo. I'm out of here. I like blow my load too soon. He's like, I haven't stamped it yet. Oh, I mean, they're like, they're pretty, they're good. There's parts of it that I like. Did you stamp it? Nickelbacks sucks. Wow. All right, well, Matt, thanks so much. That was

1:20:28 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Extremely married. Of course. Here's to 11 more. Are you a sex worker?

1:20:42 Matt: More stressful, but I wasn't going to go too nuts on you. And that was pretty much how it goes if it's going to be a little difficult sometimes. It doesn't get that much worse. So there you go. Good job. You're extremely married. Congratulations. Congrats again. You guys are what we call in the

1:20:51 Thomas: Was so much fun, and we were extremely married. They always say that. All right, thanks so much, listeners. Thanks, Matt. Thanks, Lydia, for extremely marrying me. See everyone next time. Sorry, not fake things because I'm not a spy. Why did you say that? Is a trip a podcast could someone tell you the brand of the ankle monitor they had on? Sorry, my lawyer just told me I should stop admitting a crime, so I'm gonna say no. Oh, my lawyer said I shouldn't repeat what he says. When do I start

1:21:45 Matt: Business extremely married? Are you a spy, sir, for Canada? You weren't supposed to repeat that.

1:22:09 Matt: Okay, all right, all right, let's all just take a beat. You'll either have to accompany him to his naturalization ceremony or kill him. My hero, Jordan Peterson. I don't know when was the last time you

1:22:14 Thomas: Start not repeating. Yeah. Yep.

1:22:27 Thomas: Right on.

1:22:28 Lydia: Look at this photograph.

1:22:28 Thomas: Nickelback. Woo. Well, forgive you for beating your wife, but are you Chinese?

1:22:38 Matt: Fucked your wife.