Thomas and Lydia Take the Marriage Exam

May 1, 2026

Matt Cameron, an immigration attorney with 20 years of courtroom and interview experience, guides a mock marriage interview and legal debrief. Short scenes recreate tense USCIS questioning. Then Matt explains common pitfalls, memory issues, polygamy and proxy marriage quirks, privacy concerns, and how criminal history or prior divorces can complicate residency applications.

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INSIGHT

Modern Bars Rooted In 19th Century Bigotry

Insight: Many inadmissibility rules trace to 19th-century racial anxieties.
Matt Cameron traces questions about prostitution, drugs, and polygamy back to anti-Chinese and other historic biases shaping modern rules.

ADVICE

Disclose Foreign Dismissals And Diversions

Do always disclose arrests and prosecutions even if dismissed abroad.
Cameron warns that foreign dismissals or diversion programs often still count as convictions for US immigration purposes and must be reported.

ADVICE

Practice The Interview With Your Attorney

Do practice answers with your attorney until you're comfortable.
Matt Cameron says mock interviews help clients know what they'll say and ease stress; frequency depends on how nervous the couple is.

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In this very special episode, Thomas and Lydia Smith celebrate their 11th wedding anniversary in the most normal and romantic way possible: subjecting themselves to an extended interrogation about their marriage by a federal agent. After setting the scene in a (very slightly) parallel universe in which Thomas was born in Canada and committed a series of Nickelback-related misdemeanors before overstaying his student visa, Matt draws from his twenty years of experience in sitting through hundreds of immigration interviews to play out an unscripted simulation of what his clients and their U.S. citizen spouses go through when they are applying for residency through marriage.

We then reconvene to review how the Smiths did, and Matt takes us through some of the legal issues raised in this interview as well as some of the more interesting aspects of the residency process generally.

Finally, we discuss some of the weirder aspects of the law surrounding immigration through marriage beyond the facts of this interview, including (among many others):

--Do you really have to prove to the satisfaction of an immigration officer that your marriage includes sex?

--Why might the US government refuse to recognize a prior divorce from your home country?

--Will federal immigration authorities really recognize a Zoom wedding conducted from completely different continents?

--Can you bring multiple partners if you are coming from a country where polygamy is legal?

“Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (1/20/2025 edition)
“Immigration Consequences of Criminal Activity,” Congressional Research Service (5/28/21)
Matter of Peterson, 12 I&N Dec. 663 (BIA 1968)
“Kicking the INA Out of Bed: Abolishing the Consummation Requirement for Proxy Marriages,” 22 Hastings J. Gender & L. 55 (2011)
“Second Wives Club: Mapping the Impact of Polygamy in U.S. Immigration Law,” Claire A. Smearman, Berkeley Journal of Immigration Law (Dec. 2009)