The XX Factor: What women really think.

Green Cards for Sex? (Thank You, NYT)

I am curious about what all those people who think immigrants have such a fabulous free ride in this country think about this New York Times story about a 22-year-old Colombian woman, married to an American citizen, who was informed by a U.S. immigration agent that her application for a green card would sail right through—after a couple of blow jobs, that is.

According to the story, this was not even an isolated incident: "Money, not sex, is the more common currency of corruption in immigration, but according to Congressional testimony in 2006 by Michael Maxwell, former director of the agency's internal investigations, more than 3,000 backlogged complaints of employee misconduct had gone uninvestigated for lack of staff, including 528 involving criminal allegations."

In a conversation the Colombian woman taped on her cell phone, she pleaded with the agent not to force her to have sex with him: "If I do it, it's like very hard for me, because I have my husband, and I really fall in love with him.'' But when she tried to get out of the car where this conversation was taking place, he stopped her and made her perform oral sex. Too frightened to take the tape to the police, she eventually went to the newspaper, and, because there is a God, found reporter Nina Bernstein. Now the immigration agent has been arrested, but the woman's new husband—no Silda Spitzer he—has left her.

Is it fair to immigrants like this poor woman to leave them effectively unprotected by the law? And to all of you who've canceled your NYT subscription because it was mean to your favorite candidate or added a conservative voice to the opinion page, have you really thought about what we'd do without newspapers? Or without reporters like Nina who have the time and the inclination to actually listen to this woman's story and say, That happened to you? We'll see about that. If that day ever comes, I don't want to hear a word out of you.