Rishta in Philadelphia

How to read a Philadelphia profile properly

This is the end of the corridor where people can still buy

Everything distinctive about a Philadelphia rishta follows from one number: housing here costs a fraction of what it costs ninety minutes up the turnpike. A rowhouse in the Northeast or a semi-detached in Delaware County is within reach of an ordinary salary in a way that nothing in New York or North Jersey is. Wages are lower here too, but the housing gap is far wider than the wage gap, and families work that out quickly.

So this city collects people. A great many Pakistani households in the Philadelphia suburbs are young couples whose parents are still in Brooklyn, Queens, Edison or Jersey City, who moved down for a house and a driveway. That matters for a search in three ways. First, a Philadelphia profile often has its family network somewhere else, so the checking should be done in the city the family came from rather than only here — ask where the parents live and who there would speak for them. Second, a proposal from New York or New Jersey into Philadelphia is an ordinary thing rather than a long-distance match: it is ninety minutes to two hours by road and about the same by train, and families do it for a Saturday sitting. Third, and most usefully, if a couple is weighing where to settle, this is the part of the corridor where owning a home is realistic — and for a bride arriving from Pakistan, a house with a garden is a very different first year from a shared apartment.

On geography inside the metro, be specific rather than saying Philadelphia. Upper Darby and the Northeast are both in the city but are forty-five minutes apart across traffic and feel like different worlds. King of Prussia and Bensalem are an hour from each other. Cherry Hill is in New Jersey and Wilmington is in Delaware, both of them still this metro. Name your township and read theirs.

Buying an old American house: the inspection nobody tells you to ask for

Because houses here are affordable, Philadelphia is where a great many Pakistani couples buy their first home — and because they are affordable they are also old. Much of the housing stock in this region was built between the 1890s and the 1950s. A cheap old house is often a very good buy and occasionally an expensive mistake, and the difference is entirely in what was checked before signing.

So, plainly: never buy a house in America without a professional home inspection, and never let anybody tell you it is a formality or that the seller will not allow it. You pay for it, you choose the inspector, you are entitled to be present, and you should walk the house with them. The specific things that matter in old housing stock here: the age and condition of the roof, and when it was last replaced; the heating system, its age and its fuel, because an oil boiler or a sixty-year-old furnace is a near-term bill; the electrical panel and whether any of the original cloth-insulated or knob-and-tube wiring remains, which can also affect whether you can insure the house; the water service line and the internal plumbing, because lead and galvanised pipes are common in this region; asbestos in old pipe lagging and floor tiles; and water in the basement, which in a Philadelphia rowhouse is the single most common hidden cost. In a rowhouse also ask about the party walls and the shared roof, because a neighbour’s neglected roof becomes your damp wall, and about whether the sewer lateral has been scoped.

One item deserves its own sentence because it is a child-health matter rather than a money matter. Lead paint is present in a great many pre-1978 American homes, and this region has a lot of them. Lead is genuinely harmful to small children, the law requires sellers and landlords to disclose known lead paint in older properties, testing is inexpensive and remediation is possible. If a young couple is buying a house and children are expected, this is the one thing on the list not to shrug at. Ask, test, and deal with it before a baby is crawling on the floor.

And for a rishta conversation specifically: if a family is offering the couple a house, or a floor of a house, ask the same questions you would ask a stranger. It is not ingratitude. A gift with a thirty-thousand-dollar roof behind it is still a kind gift, but everybody should know about the roof.

Childcare costs more than the rent, and it decides whether she keeps working

This is the American fact that families on both sides consistently fail to work out in advance, and it quietly determines how a marriage is actually lived. The United States has no general public provision for young children. Full-time nursery care for a baby or toddler typically costs as much as a rent or a mortgage payment, and in expensive areas it costs more. For two children under school age it can exceed either parent’s entire take-home pay.

Which produces a conversation that should happen before the nikah and almost never does. If the plan is that both will work, somebody should actually price childcare in the area they will live in, because a two-income plan frequently collapses in the first year after a baby when the family discovers that one whole salary is being handed to a nursery. The usual outcomes are: she leaves work, which should be her decision made with the real number in front of her rather than a default arrived at by surprise; or a grandparent comes, which needs its own honest planning about visas, how long, where they will sleep and whether they want to; or the couple works opposite shifts, which is survivable and hard; or they move to be near family, which is a large decision to take retrospectively.

Two further things worth asking while you are on the subject. Does either employer offer paid parental leave, because a great many American employers offer none at all, and the federal protection that does exist is unpaid and has eligibility conditions about how long you have worked there. And what does the health insurance cover for maternity, which is covered in more detail on our Dallas page. The point of asking all of this early is not pessimism. It is that a couple who have seen the numbers make a plan, and a couple who have not make an argument.

Filing as a married couple, and the rule about accounts in Pakistan

Here is a piece of American administration that catches Pakistani families repeatedly, and it is better learned from a page than from a penalty notice.

Start with the simple part. Married couples in the United States normally file their taxes jointly, which is usually more favourable than filing separately, and that is the first year in which the household becomes a single financial entity on paper. A spouse who has arrived but does not yet have a Social Security number cannot simply be left off: she needs either an SSN or an individual taxpayer identification number so she can be included. And where one spouse is not yet a resident for tax purposes, there is an election that allows the couple to be treated as residents together, which usually helps and has consequences worth understanding before it is made. None of this is complicated, but all of it needs doing in the first filing season rather than two years later.

Then the part that is genuinely serious. An American citizen or resident must report their worldwide income — not only income earned in the United States. Rent from a flat in Lahore, a share of agricultural income, profit from a family business in Karachi, interest from a Pakistani bank account: all of it is reportable, whatever tax has already been paid in Pakistan, and there are mechanisms that usually prevent being taxed twice. Separately, and this is the one that produces the harsh penalties, holdings in foreign financial accounts above certain thresholds have to be declared annually in their own filings. That includes accounts a person is only a signatory on, which is how a wife ends up with a reporting obligation over her father’s account in Pakistan without ever having thought of it as hers.

The practical advice is short. Once a spouse becomes a US resident, list every account, property and business interest she holds or signs on anywhere in the world, and have a tax preparer who actually understands international reporting look at it in the first year. It costs a few hundred dollars and it removes a problem that is unpleasant and expensive to fix after the fact. And on the Pakistani side: if a family is planning to put property in a daughter’s name before she emigrates, understand that it does not become invisible when she lands.

If a marriage goes wrong, what a woman in America actually has

We would rather put this on a page than leave families to find out in a crisis. The overwhelming majority of marriages arranged through a service like this one are decent and work. A small number are not, and when a woman has arrived from Pakistan into a household where things turn bad, the thing that keeps her there is almost always a belief about her position that is false.

So, the facts. Serious help exists and it is confidential. Most large American cities, including this one, have organisations run by and for South Asian and Muslim women that handle exactly these situations — in the right language, without judgement and without going to the community. They advise, and they do not act without the woman’s consent. Secondly, and this is the point that matters most: United States immigration law contains specific protections for the abused spouse of a citizen or permanent resident, which allow a person to apply for status on their own without the spouse’s knowledge, participation or consent. The sentence he can have you deported, or my family controls your papers, is the standard thing said in these situations and it is not true in the way it is told. Anyone who has been told it should speak to an accredited immigration adviser or a legal clinic before believing it.

Two pieces of preparation that cost nothing and that every woman marrying abroad should do, not because anything is expected to go wrong but for the same reason anybody keeps a copy of their documents. Know where your passport, your visa paperwork, your marriage certificate, your qualifications and your nikah nama physically are, and keep your own scanned copies somewhere only you can reach, such as your own email. And have your own bank account and your own phone, as we say on several other pages, from the first month.

And to the families: if a daughter or a daughter-in-law tells you something is wrong, the correct response is to listen first and to think about the community second. Our safety guidance sets out the practical steps, and if a situation is urgent, the emergency services in the United States are reached on 911 and do not require anybody to explain their immigration status first.