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Immigration – marriage — sponsorship — support

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//July 12, 2012//

Immigration – marriage — sponsorship — support

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//July 12, 2012//

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United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit

Civil

Immigration – marriage —  sponsorship — support

When a citizen obtains permanent residence for an alien spouse, his duty to provide her support at 125 percent of the poverty level, even if they divorce, is absolute.

“[W]e can’t see much benefit to imposing a duty to mitigate on a sponsored immigrant. The cost, besides the sponsor’s diminished incentive to screen the alien for a bad work ethic, would be the increased complication of enforcing the duty of support by giving the sponsor a defense—and not even a defense likely to prevail. If Liu doesn’t want to work, forcing her to make job applications is unlikely to land her a job. It is easy enough for an applicant to make herself an unattractive hire. Mund’s interposition of the defense may be motivated more by spite than by greed. The last thing federal courts need is to be dragged into domestic-relations disputes.”

“There is also the question of what body of law we would look to for the contours of a duty to mitigate in a case like this. The duty is federal and so would presumably be defined by federal common law. We are not pointed to any federal common law duty of mandatory job search, so the federal courts would have to create one for I-864 cases (should the courts ever see another one—which would be likely if we upheld the district court). It hardly seems worth the effort.”

Affirmed.

11-1453 Liu v. Mund

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, Conley, J., Posner, J.

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