05.29.08 kulturnatib

Frankly, a most difficult call

Frank Sinatra is, by talent, a great singer. By association, he was known to be a hobnobber with mobsters and, by a sure bet, would have made a lousy immigration official.

I normally don't think of Frank Sinatra even if I belong to that generation when the way to a girl's heart and other body parts was lubed by syrupy love songs of the harana – though no longer in the classic tradition of holding forth under the girl's window and no longer even called that unless we were being facetious. We called it folk singing.

A song or two by Frank Sinatra was a mainstay in the repertoire of those haranas. And, why not? His songs were heart rending enough to rend more than the heart in what the Tagalogs call 'laglag panty.' That, of course, was never the intention of the Sinatra nor ourselves, earnest haranistas that we were.

Anyway, during the week, looking over the newspaper rack at my favorite library, my favorite newspaper jumped out at me. The headline of the Globe and Mail read, “Ottawa dispatches secret teams in bid to crack down on phony foreign weddings.”

Just as soon as I read that, out jumped Sinatra, too. While in the news story the Canadian government is grappling with what it says is a growing concern for fraudulent or phony marital alliances – indeed, in another level, these marriages are facilitated through the phone – whose ultimate outcome is immigration of one of the partners and sometimes members of their family as well to Canada, Sinatra has no such problem.

Listen: Love and marriage, love and marriage, they go together like a horse and carriage . . . You can't have one without the other . . . Try to separate them, it's an illusion, try and you will only come to this conclusion . . . .

After mulling wryly on Sinatra and proceeding to read the banner story, I sensed a creeping defensiveness. And then, the guarded need to look around to see if there was anyone to pick up the first stone and throw it so I could join them, even if there was also the growing awareness that, like most defensive gestures, it wasn't clear where to throw the stone at and why.

In any case, the news item proceeded on about 'clandestine', 'fraud' teams 'fanning out to foreign countries to gather information about elaborately staged phony weddings aimed at duping Canadian immigration officials.' And, then, presumably, nipping the problem at the bud.

Like any well-rounded news story, some experiences and contrary viewpoints were presented. An Ontarian man gained some fame in 2005 by suing the government, alleging that "the bureaucracy is destroying my family,” and expressing his outrage at Canada's immigration system for refusing to allow his new wife to immigrate to Toronto.

He won the suit, spending a lot of money in the process. His wife was allowed in. She brought along her mother and a daughter. Soon, he was back badgering the government. This time as an officer of the group called Canadians Against Immigration Fraud.

The government was right the first time. His wife was into the marriage just for the lure of immigration. She was in. He was out.

But does these happen only in advanced, immigration lucrative countries? No. This happens also in the Philippines. Only it is tacitly encouraged by the government in the guise of retirement havens or investment opportunities.

A cursory look at pockets of resort developments in the country and you will find an odd couple separated in age and even more distant in cultural disposition who owns a development in the name of, usually, the Filipino wife.

This is the open secret of many 'countryside developments.' Or, even in urban Cebu where foreigners get to own chunks of property prohibited by the Constitution but bypassed through a wedding certificate with the Filipino partner standing in as dummy owner of the property.

This leads to a lot of problems, least of all those of love and its more sublime manifestations.

This reminds me of a foreigner friend who has been in the country for some time now. He marries a Filipina who bears him a child. He leaves the countryside, more or less abandoning the wife and child for the city. But, for all this, he becomes, in language and behavior, even more Pinoy. Even in his relative poverty.

Just as Sinatra, in the face of this love-cum-immigration problem, sounds so crushingly corny, we often fall back on the neither better, pat explanation of the bad eggs always being with the good, which, as we know, is a most difficult call.