Not coming to America

last updated 8 January 2015

Nairobi, Kenya

Kenyan police arrested 77 people this week on suspicion of lying to get U.S. visas. The suspects allegedly paid the Kenyan winners of the annual U.S. green card lottery to claim them as spouses or children so they, too, could get U.S. visas and possibly green cards. Almost all of them were released, but only after being detained without charges for four days, twice as long as the law allows. The arrests prompted outrage from some Kenyan newspapers and human-rights groups, which argued that the suspects’ rights had been violated. The Kenya Times, though, blamed the suspects for “seeking to corrupt their way to becoming economic refugees in the U.S.”