[3] Of the foreign brides given residence status in the United States in 2002, 50% were from East Asia (mainly China, Vietnam and the Philippines), 25% were from European countries (namely Russia and Ukraine), and 5% were from Latin America.
[4] Due to the rising cost of paying for a bride in China, some Chinese men from working class communities have paid marriage brokers for wives from Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia.
During the 1990s, the majority of Asian mail-order brides came from the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and China.
[8] In 2022, Monica Liu published findings which question the common assumption that mail-order brides in East Asia are often seeking marriage to escape poverty.
[13] In testimony before the United States Senate, Professor Donna Hughes said that two-thirds of Ukrainian women interviewed wanted to live abroad and this rose to 97% in the resort city of Yalta.
[17] International marriage agencies encourage women to register for their services, and facilitate communication and meetings with men from developed regions of Europe, North America, Japan, South Korea, and Australia.
[20] International dating sites provide a wide variety of online communication, including instant messaging, email letters, webchat, phone translation, virtual gifts, live games, and mobile-based chat.
Genetic studies of French Canadians have suggested that millions of people in Canada today are descended from the filles du roi.
When women in France heard of the terrible conditions and of how the Pelican girls had been treated, the government was unable to recruit many more mail-order brides.
[25]: 65 They attempted to attract women living back East; the men wrote letters to churches and published personal advertisements in magazines and newspapers.
In 1922, two ships docked in New York with 900 mail-order brides from Eastern European countries such as Turkey, Romania, Armenia, and Greece, fleeing the Greco-Turkish War.
[44] Until 2001 Canada's immigration policy designated mail-order brides under the "family class" to refer to spouses and dependents and "fiancé(e)" class for those intending to marry, with only limited recognition of externally married opposite-sex "common law" relationships; same-sex partners were processed as independent immigrants or under a discretionary provision for "humane and compassionate" considerations.
[64] A dissertation by Jasney E. Cogua-Lopez, "Through the Prisms of Gender and Power: Agency in International Courtship between Colombian Women and American Men", suggests various reasons for this growth, including continuing cultural inequality between the sexes despite equality being codified in the country's laws (honor killings were not made completely illegal until 1980).
The Philippine congress enacted the Anti Mail-Order Bride Law on 13 June 1990, as a result of stories in the local media about Filipinas being abused by their foreign husbands.
Successful prosecution under this statute is rare or non-existent[70] as widespread deployment of the Internet in the mid-1990s brought a proliferation of websites operating outside the Philippines which legally remain beyond the reach of Filipino law.
One Montana site profiled in an ABS-CBN News and Current Affairs report entitled "Pinay Brides" circumvented the restrictions by characterising its role as that of a travel agency.
[72] The New York Times reports, "Every month, hundreds of South Korean men fly to Vietnam, the Philippines, Nepal and Uzbekistan on special trips.
[73] One method men use when choosing young girls as wives is "Like a judge in a beauty pageant, the man interviews the women, many of them 20 years younger than he, and makes a choice".
[75] The Korea Times reports that every year, thousands of Korean men sign up for matches with Filipina brides through agencies and by mail order.
[77] The Korean men feel that because of the difficult circumstances from which the Filipina women come, cultural differences and the language barrier, they "will not run away".
"According to the poll, 32.1 percent of the men said they felt the biggest benefit of marrying foreign women is their lack of interest in their groom's educational background and financial or social status.
[79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87][88] In June 2013, The Philippine embassy in Seoul reported that it had received many complaints from Filipinas who have married Korean men through mail-order, frequently becoming "victims of grave abuses".
[89] The Philippine police rescued 29 mail-order brides on their way to marry South Korea men whom Chief Superintendent Reginald Villasanta, head of an organised crime task force, says were "duped into promises of an instant wealthy life through marriage with Korean gentlemen".
In many cases however, victims were fed false information about the background of their future spouse and family, and suffered abuse from the South Korean men, which led to "abandonment of the marital home, separation and divorce", Villasanta said.
"[74][90] In November 2009, Philippine Ambassador to South Korea Luis T. Cruz warned Filipina women against marrying Korean men.
He said in recent months that the Philippine Embassy in Seoul has received complaints from Filipina wives of abuses committed by their Korean husbands that caused separation, divorce and abandonment.
[101] On 4 June 2001, Turkmenian President Saparmurat Niyazov (also known as Turkmenbashi) authorized a decree that required foreigners to pay a $50,000 fee to marry a Turkmen citizen (regardless of how they met), and to live in the country and own property for one year.
[105] In enacting IMBRA, Congress was responding to claims by the Tahirih Justice Center (TJC), a woman's advocacy group, that mail-order brides were susceptible to domestic abuse because they are unfamiliar with the laws, language and customs of their new home.
The European Connections case ended when the judge ruled against the plaintiff, finding the law constitutional regarding a dating company.
On 26 March 2007, U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper dismissed with prejudice a suit for injunctive relief filed by European Connections, agreeing with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and TJC that IMBRA is a constitutional exercise of Congressional authority to regulate for-profit dating websites and agencies where the primary focus is on introducing Americans to foreigners.