Rishta in Dallas

How to read a Dallas profile properly

Texas is one of the few states where a nikah alone can make you legally married

Everywhere else on this site we say the same thing: an Islamic marriage with no government licence is a valid nikah and, in almost every American state, no marriage at all in law. Texas is one of the handful of exceptions, and anybody marrying here needs to understand it, because it cuts both ways and almost nobody knows about it.

Texas recognises what it calls an informal marriage — what most people call common-law marriage. It is created, with no licence and no ceremony, when three things are true together: the two people agree that they are married, they afterwards live together in Texas as a married couple, and they represent to other people that they are married. Nothing has to be filed. A nikah in a Dallas masjid, followed by the couple living together and being introduced everywhere as husband and wife, can therefore amount to a legal marriage in Texas even if no county clerk was ever involved. Texas also allows a couple to file a declaration of informal marriage with the county clerk if they want it on record.

The good edge of this is real. A woman whose family never arranged a licence is not left with nothing: she may well be legally married, with the rights that carry in property, in a hospital, in an inheritance. The bad edge is just as real. People can be married without intending the legal consequences, which matters enormously if either of them later wants to marry somebody else, because a second marriage while an informal one subsists is bigamy and the second marriage is void. And an informal marriage has to be proved with evidence — witnesses, tenancy papers, photographs, how they were introduced — which is a miserable thing to have to do years later.

Our advice is unchanged and now has a second reason behind it. Get the county marriage licence and the certificate. It is inexpensive, it takes very little time, and it removes all of this argument. Immigration will not accept a nikah nama in place of a government certificate in any case, so if either side will ever need to sponsor the other, the certificate is not optional.

Two further Texas facts belong here while we are on the law. Texas is a community-property state, so what either spouse earns during the marriage is generally owned by both, which is worth understanding before a house or a business is bought in one name. And if a marriage does fail, Texas imposes a waiting period of around two months before a divorce can be finalised, and is unusually restrictive about ongoing spousal maintenance — the amounts and the durations the law allows are limited and are not what families from other countries expect. None of that is a reason for gloom at a nikah. It is a reason to write the mehr on the nikah nama as a real figure, witnessed, and to keep the document.

Works in IT in Dallas: find out who actually employs him

This metro is one of the largest centres of South Asian IT consulting in the world, and no phrase on a Dallas profile hides more than works in IT. It can mean a permanent, well-paid employee of a large American company with full benefits and a green card application already filed. It can also mean something considerably more precarious, and a family in Pakistan has no way of telling the two apart without asking.

The structure to understand is the consultancy, or staffing company. A small firm — frequently South Asian owned, and there are hundreds of them in Plano, Irving and Richardson — sponsors a worker’s visa and then places him with a client company, taking a margin on his billing rate. The worker goes to work every day at a well-known corporation, and will say he works there, but his legal employer is the consultancy. Many of these firms are entirely legitimate and treat people well. A minority do not, and the pattern is well documented: a worker left on the bench — unpaid or barely paid — between client projects, which is not permitted but happens; fees and legal costs pushed back onto the worker, which is also not permitted; pressure not to change employers because the visa and the pending green card both sit with the firm; and in the worst cases, paperwork filed that does not reflect reality, which can put the worker’s status at risk years later.

So ask five questions, plainly and without embarrassment. Who is the legal employer on the visa paperwork, as opposed to the office he goes to. Is the position permanent employment or a contract through a third party. Has he ever been on the bench without pay, and for how long. Has the green card process actually been started, and if so at which stage — a labour certification, a filed petition, an approved petition and a priority date are four very different things, and families are routinely told the process has started when nothing has been filed. And finally: what happens to the household if the client project ends next month.

This matters most for the woman, which is why it is on this page. A spouse who comes on a dependent visa holds a status that is derived entirely from his. If his employment ends, her right to be here ends with it, and she may have no permission to work in the meantime unless a separate authorisation has been granted. She is taking on his employment risk completely, without any control over it. She is entitled to know exactly what that risk is before the nikah, and any decent family will tell her.

The mortgage is not the payment: what a Texas house really costs

Families in Pakistan hear that Texas has no state income tax and conclude that Dallas is a cheap place to live. Half of that is true and the conclusion is wrong, and it leads to real disappointment when a bride arrives expecting a standard of living that the salary does not actually buy.

Texas charges no state income tax, which genuinely leaves more in the hand each month than the same salary would in California or New York. It makes that money back through property. Property tax rates in this metro are among the highest in the country and are charged on the assessed value of the house every year, so a large suburban house carries a tax bill that can rival a second mortgage. On top of that, home insurance in Texas is among the most expensive in the United States because of hail and wind damage, and in many of the newer Plano, Frisco and Prosper developments there is a homeowners association fee as well. Then the summer: four months of air conditioning in hundred-degree heat produces electricity bills that genuinely surprise people.

So when a figure is quoted, ask for the all-in monthly number — loan, tax, insurance, association fee — rather than the mortgage payment, because the difference between the two is often forty or fifty per cent. And when a profile mentions owning a large house in Frisco, that is a real achievement and also a large recurring obligation. The useful question is not how big the house is. It is what is left at the end of the month.

Children, citizenship and what a baby does and does not change

A great many Dallas marriages begin while one or both sides are still some way from permanent residence, so this comes up constantly and is almost always half understood. The facts are simple and worth stating cleanly.

A child born on American soil is an American citizen from birth, whatever the parents’ immigration status. That is settled and it applies to a child born to two people on work visas, on student visas, or waiting on a green card. What it does not do is change the parents’ status. A citizen child does not give a parent a visa, cannot sponsor a parent until the child is twenty-one years old, and does not protect a parent from having to leave if a visa ends. Anybody who tells a family that having a baby will fix the immigration problem is wrong, and a marriage arranged on that understanding has been arranged on a false premise.

The practical steps for a Pakistani family are worth knowing in advance. The hospital files the birth, and the family then obtains the state birth certificate and, if they want it, a United States passport. Separately, the birth can be registered with the Pakistani consulate, which is what allows the child to hold Pakistani documentation as well — Pakistan permits dual nationality with the United States, so a child can hold both. Doing this early, while the paperwork is simple, is far easier than doing it when the child is twelve and a grandparent is ill.

And one piece of advice that is not about law at all. Before planning a pregnancy, find out exactly what the health insurance covers for maternity, what the deductible is and what the out-of-pocket maximum is. Childbirth in America with good coverage is manageable. Childbirth with no coverage or thin coverage can cost more than a wedding, and a young couple should know that number before rather than after. If the husband is self-employed or working through a consultancy with poor benefits, this is one of the first things to settle, not the last.

Nine thousand square miles, and Texas is one market

Dallas–Fort Worth is bigger than some countries. Plano to Fort Worth is forty miles and can be an hour and a half; Frisco to Arlington is similar. Families routinely underestimate this and then discover that a match made across the Metroplex means seeing one set of parents once a month. So read the suburb, name your own, and work out the drive honestly before anything is agreed. The two halves of the metro also feel different: Plano, Richardson, Frisco and Irving hold the largest and most established Pakistani communities, while the mid-cities and Fort Worth side is smaller, more spread out and often less expensive.

Then widen, because Texas behaves as a single market for rishta purposes and families here drive distances that would horrify anyone in Britain. Houston is three and a half to four hours and has the largest Pakistani community in the state; Austin is three, San Antonio four and a half, and Oklahoma City three. A family will get in a car on a Friday afternoon for a Saturday sitting and be home on Sunday. If you are searching from Dallas, treat Houston as near rather than far.

Beyond Texas, the strongest links are to the places DFW families came from — New York, New Jersey and Chicago in the previous generation — and to Atlanta and the Carolinas, where the same move for housing and work is still happening. DFW is also a major airline hub with direct flights across the country and one-stop routes to Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi through the Gulf and Istanbul, which makes both the searching and the visiting easier than in most American cities.