Transnational Marriage Migration and Marriage Migration: An Overview

Abstract

This chapter will present a global overview of current patterns of marriage migration. It will draw on academic and grey literature and identify those cross-border marriages that may be considered fully transnational, and which refl ect and are a consequence of ordinary family and community relationships that extend across political boundaries. It will contrast them with examples of marriages across international borders that are not transnational by accepted defi nitions or which are only incipiently transnational. The chapter proposes viewing cross-border marriages on a continuum between those that are fi rmly transnational and those that are clearly not. It will discuss the drivers of cross-border marriage migration and will demonstrate that while these marriages represent private relationships and intimate contracts between individuals, migration for the purpose of forming intimate partnerships is shaped and in many cases organized and arranged by numerous actors. These actors may include friends, family, community members and/or commercial agencies who take a direct role in arranging marriages across borders. Actors include policy-makers and other social and cultural regulators who indirectly infl uence and shape of marriages through institutions and other structures. It will be argued that this complexity of motivation for global marriage migration is in sharp contrast to the often-simplistic state and legislative conceptualizations of marriage migration. Marriage migration off ers the possibility of migration in a world in which migration routes are narrowing and can be seen as both a result of the transnational strategies of migrants and a driver for the development of future transnational communities and consciousnesses.