10/12/2026
I frequently talk about immigration, legal and illegal, from a purely political perspective. Immigration also has an effect on my law practice and the American judicial system in ways that one may not expect.
I’ve seen a noticeable increase in cases involving non-native born Americans. Many of the underlying family-law issues look familiar—support, custody, and related disputes. What’s different is the frequency with which these matters now involve concurrent proceedings in foreign courts and competing judgments from other countries. I recently completed such a case.
My client is a naturalized U.S. citizen born and raised in Egypt but working in the U.S. His wife is a native born Egyptian non-U.S. citizen residing in Egypt with the parties’ children. The wife filed for child and spousal support in both Egypt and the U.S., despite never having stepped foot – either herself or the children – in the U.S.
The husband/father, pro se, filed preliminary objections to the wife’s Pennsylvania support complaint challenging personal jurisdiction. Meanwhile the Egyptian court awarded the wife/mother child support but denied her spousal support based upon an application of Sharia law.
After the Pennsylvania court overruled the husband’s preliminary objections and kept the case on track, I entered my appearance and focused the defense on a narrower procedural question: whether the Pennsylvania court should create a second original support order while Egyptian judgments were already in place. I filed a motion seeking dismissal of the Pennsylvania support complaint or, alternatively, a stay of the proceedings in light of the Egyptian judgments. In the motion I emphasized the risks of duplicative original support orders and the distinction between recognizing or enforcing an existing foreign determination and creating a separate Pennsylvania obligation. I also filed a motion to strike the wife’s request for attorneys’ fees.
After oral argument, the court recognized the complexity, cancelled the routine support conference, and scheduled a special two-hour listing so the threshold issues could be addressed first. In the end, the wife withdrew the Pennsylvania support complaint, and the parties executed a joint stipulation withdrawing the attorneys’ fee claim. The case concluded without a second support order in Pennsylvania and without a fee award.
With the substantial rise in legal immigration over recent decades, American courts—including those in Pennsylvania—are increasingly being asked to manage these kinds of cross-border complications. Cases that once stayed within a single jurisdiction can now involve foreign judgments, parallel proceedings, and questions about when and whether a U.S. court should exercise jurisdiction in the face of existing orders from abroad.
These cases are complex, time consuming and costly. We had to have every legal paper filed in the Egyptian Court translated by a certified translator into English for presentation in a U.S. court. We had to try to understand the rudiments of Egyptian and Sharia law. The York County Judge presiding over our case stated on the record that he had never handled such a cross jurisdictional case in his many decades on the bench. I expected to see more of these cases in the years to come.
Even legal immigration is producing measurable effects on the justice system: more overlapping litigation, more procedural complexity, and more demands on courts that were not designed around frequent multi-country family disputes. This is not an isolated phenomenon. It is one practical consequence of sustained high levels of immigration, and courts are having to adapt to it case by case.
