Court decisions over marriage migration in Finland: a problem with transnational family ties

Abstract

Within the growing amount of scholarship on transnational families and family reunification policies in Europe, studies that consider both transnational family constellations and the regulation of marriage and family migration rarely intersect. This article considers both migrants' transnational family ties and nation-states' efforts to restrict border-crossing family formation by showing how migrants' transnational families can be used as the grounds for being refused entry by immigration authorities. Through the case study on Finland, we analyse the processes at work when transnational family ties meet the legal norms as interpreted by immigration authorities and courts. Our research leads to three main conclusions. First, our study illustrates how nation-states fail to recognise the existence and importance of multi-sited family ties when regulating marriage migration. Second, we show how marriage migration of certain groups such as the elderly is poorly understood both by immigration authorities and scholars, and thus argue for the importance of an intersectional approach when studying the regulation of marriage migration. Third, our analysis shows how legal analyses on the regulation of marriage migration can and should pay attention to the agency of transnational couples when they try to get their marriage recognised by immigration authorities.