Transnational Marriage and Partner Migration: Constellations of Security, Citizenship, and Rights

By Betty de Hart, Saskia Bonjour, Massilia Ourabah and 12 more

This multidisciplinary collection investigates the ways in which marriage and partner migration processes have become the object of state scrutiny, and the site of sustained political interventions in several states around the world. Covering cases as varied as the United States, Canada, Japan, Iran, France, Belgium or the Netherlands, among others, contributors reveal how marriage and partner migration have become battlegrounds for political participation, control, and exclusion. Which forms of attachments (towards the family, the nation, or specific individuals) have become framed as risks to be managed? How do such preoccupations translate into policies? With what consequences for those affected by them, in terms of rights and access to citizenship? The book answers these questions by analyzing the interplay between issues of security, citizenship and rights from the perspectives of migrants and policymakers, but also from actors who negotiate encounters with the state, such as lawyers, non-governmental organizations, and translators. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Feb 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781978816725

Book preview

Introduction

Thinking in Constellations: Marriage and Partner Migration in Relation to Security, Citizenship, and Rights

ANNE-MARIE D’AOUST

Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country (United Nations 1948). With Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) proclaimed by the United Nations (U.N.) General Assembly on December 10, 1948, a breakthrough was set to ensure freedom of movement for men and women the world over. From 1946 to 1948, the famous U.N. Commission on Human Rights was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt (depicted in Figure I.1 below at the Third Session of the Commission in 1948). The Commission had managed to get the UDHR drafted and proclaimed in under two years. But in the midst of a brewing Cold War, it was neither the plight of millions of wandering subjects escaping the destructive fires of World War II, nor the recent creation of the state of Israel, nor the escalation of violence in Kashmir that led to this legal milestone in human rights history. It was the apparently small, mundane issue of providing exit visas for more or less a thousand Soviet wives of foreign husbands that garnered attention in the nascent field of human rights.¹ Article 13 came as the direct result of the sustained refusal by the Soviet state to provide exit visas for Soviet wives of diplomatic staff and military men from the Western bloc.

Already in August 1948, the New York Times had noted that the thorny issue of Russian wives threaten[ed] to bog the U.N. Council, the same way it had tied up the human rights committee for two and a half weeks in the midst of its work on drafting a declaration of human rights.² Indeed, in May 1948, the U.N. Soviet delegate, Aleksei P. Pavlov, had insisted that the future declaration of human rights should stipulate that emigration must be subject to the laws of the country of origins. This position led to a common front between the United States, Great Britain, and Chile, whose representatives claimed that the Soviet government’s refusal of permission to [let Russian wives of foreign citizens] leave the country was a violation of a basic human right.³ The committee [working on the declaration of human rights] then agreed, the New York Times simply noted, to include in the future declaration a proviso that ‘everyone is entitled to freedom of movement within the borders of each state’ and that ‘everyone has the right to leave any country,’ including his own.⁴

FIGURE I.1 Eleanor Roosevelt at the meeting of the third session of the Commission on Human Rights, 1948.

Unmoved by this challenge, the Soviet delegate explained to the U.N. Economic and Social Council that the refusal sometimes to let the Russian wives of foreigners leave the country was based solely on national security concerns: Foreigners send their nationals in to recruit agents, especially among our women, he explained. In some cases … the Government must refuse permission to wives to go home with their husbands for security reasons.⁵ In September 1948, the United States announced that it would support an International Court of Justice ruling on whether the Soviet Union has the right to deny exit to Russian women married to foreigners.⁶ The issue ultimately culminated in a U.N. General Assembly meeting on April 25, 1949. The meeting ended in the adoption of Resolution 285 (III) A-B, holding that the refusal of the Soviet Union to allow Russian wives to join their husbands abroad was a violation of the United Nation Charter (United Nations General Assembly 1949).

To anyone who has paid attention to contemporary debates surrounding marriage migration or family reunification more generally in the past twenty years, the defense mobilized against the Soviet state may sound oddly familiar. The Soviet delegate’s objections to family reunification processes on the grounds that in other countries Soviet wives would be subject to … exploitation as ‘kitchen slaves’ certainly echo contemporary discourses about women immigrants being trapped by traditions, incompatible with their newfound home country’s lifestyle and national values.⁷ British condemnations of Soviet policy as sadism and nationalism gone mad, as cutting across the instinctive disposition of men and women to fall in love, to marry and to make a home together, strike a chord too.⁸ But this time, the emotional pleas do not emanate solely from state officials: they have been reclaimed by several nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and politicians alike to condemn the restrictive policies of the United Kingdom and the United States, among others, to impose restrictions on family reunification. These restrictions run from minimum income requirements up to detention practices.

We could easily dismiss this forgotten small history of Soviet wives as a curious oddity, a funny artifact of a Cold War long gone by. Or we could exert our feminist curiosity (Enloe 2004) and try to tease out what this incident reveals about intimate geopolitics (Barabantseva, Mhurchú, and Peterson 2021; Turner and Espinoza 2021), about the intermingling of affairs of the state and affairs of the heart (Carruthers 2009, 40), when it comes to marriage and partner migration.

That the whole debate took place as the UDHR was being drafted was no small feat. If anything, the story captures the innate tension it creates between the normative idea of a right to family life as an individual, transnational human right and the state’s sovereign prerogative in managing its borders. Indeed, a fundamental clash occurs between the democratic principle that citizens and permanent residents have the right to marry the person of their choice and the sovereignty principle that states must provide security and manage migration.⁹ Marriage migration, summarizes Natasha Carver, subverts the State’s (patriarchal) presumption that it holds the prerogative over entry, since the aspiring immigrant is chosen by the individual sponsor rather than selected through criteria laid down by the state (2016, 2767).

The story is also a sobering reminder that the increased politicization of marriage and partner migration for the past twenty years, and noted in several countries across the globe, is hardly new. Speaking of colonial empires, the historian Ann Laura Stoler famously explained that the state’s concern over sentiment, the state’s assessment of the intensity of ‘feelings,’ ‘attachments,’ and senses of belonging—that prompted loyalties to race over family, or family over state—were not metaphors … but instrumental as ‘dense transfer points of power’ (2004, 7). The study of colonial rule hence revealed just how central a legal system clearly defining domestic roles and their incumbent rights (concubines, mistresses, wives, prostitutes, etc.) was in creating racial and political hierarchies that tied in with mobility (Wells 2019; Turner 2017; McClintock 1995; McClintock, Mufti, and Shohat 1997).

Likewise, the study of immigration and family reunification in the United States is closely tied to racism against Asian populations and the challenge posed by war brides of American soldiers returning from Japan and South Korea in the aftermath of the Second World War (Yamamoto 2019; Yamin 2012; Wolgin and Bloemraad 2010). It is also well documented that marriage has been instrumental in trying to regulate relations between Whites and Afro-Americans (Lublin 2005; Moran 2001). Canadian, Australian, and American nation-building processes also hinged on monogamous marriage being imposed as a political institution on Native Americans and First Nations to access land and property (Rademaker 2017; Carter 2008; Ellinghaus 2006; Cott 2002). To be sure, such state concerns are not the appanage of colonial or totalitarian states alone: they are indistinguishable from the state itself (Peterson 2020). What all these examples show, along with the chapters in this volume, is that when it comes to spouse and partner migration, issues of security, citizenship, and rights are deployed and mobilized now as they were then: it is their configurations, their understandings, and their targets that shift.

Looking at Marriage and Partner Migration under the Prism of Security, Citizenship, and Rights

This collection investigates the ways marriage and partner migration have become the object of intense state scrutiny and the site of sustained political interventions in several states (Groes and Fernandez 2018; Friedman and Mahdavi 2015; Charsley 2012).¹⁰ As the adoption of the U.N. Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration in 2018 testified, security has become a privileged framework through which policy makers and decision makers assess migration processes (e.g., Bourbeau 2015; De Genova 2017; Walters 2010). However, security is here theorized, enacted, and practiced as a management of risks rather than a response to a specific, direct threat (e.g., Aradau 2016; Burgess 2014; Rasmussen 2004; Bigo 2002). Throughout the book, we argue that the focus on marriage and partner migration should be analyzed as part of a governmentality process in which specific relations and their expected emotional manifestations become qualitative grounds for political participation, control, and exclusion. This theoretical framework raises crucial questions: Which forms of attachments (toward the family, the nation, or specific individuals) have become framed as a problem or risk to be managed? How do such preoccupations translate into actual policies, and with what consequences for those affected by them, in terms of rights and access to citizenship? This process is closely linked to security apparatuses and the ordered circulation of people and goods (Foucault 2007, 110): Who should be controlled and made the object of surveillance? Who is deemed risky and why? In other words, the issue becomes who or what raises suspicion about potential security dangers or risks—and what can be done about it to control and police them.

Thinking in Constellations: A Multidisciplinary and Relational Approach

As the contributions in this collection reveal, marriage and partner migration conjures several, often competing, understandings of what security is, who and what it targets, and what it substantially entails. Securitization processes range from seeking physical safety to mitigating the risks of separation (e.g., Zentgraf and Chinchilla 2012), from securing a financial and emotional future for one’s family (Cole and Groes 2016; Constable 2005), to protecting the welfare state (e.g., Eggebø 2010), from enforcing integration (Spencer and Charsley 2016), to defending national borders (Friedman 2010) and preventing trafficking (e.g., Piper 1999). This collection distinguishes itself with its multidisciplinary focus and its relational approach to marriage and partner migration, one that pays attention to the unfolding dynamics between a constellation formed by the three key concepts of security, citizenship, and rights. This approach enables us to take head on one of the challenges of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary work, namely, finding a common language to discuss similar issues, as some concepts echo differently from one discipline to another.

For instance, the legal technicalities associated with terms such as rights can often elude political scientists or sociologists. Similarly, for lawyers the word security might conjure specters of militarization and national security, whereas for scholars in critical security studies it might invoke an array of practices ranging from survival to mundane surveillance practices of mobility management on the part of bureaucrats and policy makers. Yet, from an anthropologist’s perspective on family migration, what security means and entails greatly differs from one place to another and even from one agent and actor to another. Mobility itself can be seen as a household risk management strategy to secure a better future. When binational couples forced to live apart contest restrictive immigration legislation and demonstrate in the street claiming a right to love, their action does not mobilize and build on the same notion of rights and security invoked by lawyers. The latter may claim that the state enjoys prerogatives to put conditions on family reunification to protect the public and the immigration system. We argue that all these discourses and practices mobilize and constitute diverse constellations of security-citizenship-rights. They are deployed to different ends, and they are uniquely experienced by a wide range of actors.

Walter Benjamin’s (1998) use of the term constellation quickly appealed to all the volume’s contributors as a helpful working metaphor to make sense of what each of us could see, coming from different disciplinary backgrounds, while still mobilizing the same vocabulary. Thinking about the relations between the site of security, citizenship, and rights analyzed as a specific constellation offers the advantage of considering how these concepts relate to one another. Even more, it draws attention to the ways that the relations between the concepts also hinge on someone’s embodied gaze. Two conclusions stem from these observations.

First, from a multidisciplinary perspective, constellation proves a useful metaphor to capture a relational approach between concepts without taking any of them for granted. A relational approach problematizes the relationships among the three terms, none of which is stable in terms of meaning.¹¹ Doing so allows for the study of different dynamics and spaces created by relations between people, objects, and places. It implies that the various terms studied are not predetermined concepts assumed to have any preestablished essence to be tested. Instead, they are taken as sites that derive their meaning, significance, and identity from the (changing) functional roles they play within [a] transaction [with other sites]. The latter, seen as a dynamic, unfolding process, becomes the primary unit of analysis, rather than the constituent elements themselves (Emirbayer 1997, 287). We are interested in the changing shape of the meaning of the relationship between security, citizenship, and rights that emerges in marriage and partner migration practices. What kind of recognition such relationships validate or preclude is what is at stake here as well.

Second, and perhaps more significantly, the idea of constellations of rights, citizenship, and security reflects our epistemological commitment to our object of study. The idea of constellation is meaningful because it specifically hangs on a viewer’s gazing standpoint, without being reduced to it. Despite apparencies of fixity, stars have their own motions: they are constantly in movement, but not in chaotic ways. Behind an apparent stillness, constellations change slowly, but surely, over time. Some will become unrecognizable ten thousand years from now. This change translates the movement that cannot be seen yet still happens and is being experienced; the fixity of the relationships between concepts such as citizenship and rights might seem evident, yet movement occurs between them, independently of the viewer’s perception.

But to be recognized as such, constellations also depend on their relationship with the viewer. Constellations make sense in the relation of the individual objects to each other and to the viewer; and [they] can be grasped only instantaneously and only from a specific viewer’s standpoint (Sahraoui and Sauter 2018, x). As the contributors stand in their respective disciplinary field, their standpoint has analytical implications that influence what is being observed, what is being seen (or not), and through what lenses. It is their own embodied gaze that contributes in making the constellation what it is, coming from a specific embodied standpoint. For instance, the stars of the Big Dipper form a different pattern on Earth than they would in space; how the grouping is perceived depends on where one stands and at what time of year. Star constellations have long evolved over time and place. Some constellations were seen and recognized only by some cultures, whereas others were known but named differently. Thinking about the relations between the site of security, citizenship, and rights analyzed as a specific constellation allows us to see them as related to one another, but also how such relations are seen and established from someone’s own embodied (and disciplinary) perspective. As a result, all the contributors to this volume share the view that no universal, totalizing claim can be made as to what the exact relationship is between security, citizenship, and rights in relation to marriage and partner migration; no one takes for granted the very categories they are working with.

How these dimensions matter, and come to matter, for whom, cannot be dissociated from the viewpoint from which the relationship is being assessed. It is thus no wonder that, despite coming from different disciplinary perspectives, all contributions engage in issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class, to name but a few identity markers, that come to matter when thinking about partner and spousal migration. Whereas issues of gender and race have traditionally been at the forefront of analyses of marriage and partner migration policies (e.g., Turner 2015; Wray 2011; Muller Myrdhal 2010), the stratification of rights of marriage and partner migration management is now increasingly linked to class and socioeconomic status, and an intersectional analysis of these policies (Gash and Yamin 2019; Kofman 2018) is needed to better account for them.

For some privileged couples, marriage migration is only one form of flexible citizenship (Ong 1999) among the different options offered to them (marrying in one’s own country, marrying in a partner’s country, marrying in a third country, etc.). For others, marriage can become a way to build and create a sense of community across continents, when citizenship and belonging have become jeopardized by war (Maunaguru 2019). Thinking in constellation enables us to present different configurations of what each of us sees when we think about security, citizenship, and rights in relation to marriage and partner migration, without assuming others see the same thing we do. Finally, and perhaps more importantly, the idea of looking at the key sites of security, citizenship, and rights as a constellation in relation to marriage and partner migration also recognizes that the movement in the relationship between these terms must also translate in a necessary movement in our ways of thinking about them.

A Governmental Understanding of Security and a Plural Take on Citizenship

Several scholarly accounts of migration processes that go beyond marriage and partner migration point to the fact that deeper inquiries into constellations of security, rights, and citizenship make sense in a governmental understanding of the phenomenon. Governmentality, summarizes Didier Fassin, includes the institutions, procedures, actions, and reflections that have populations as object. It exceeds the issue of sovereignty and complicates the question of control. It relates the power and administration of the state to the subjugation and subjectivation of individuals. It relies on political economy and policing technologies (2011, 214). When it comes to immigration, we should account for the fact that this ordering process is also underpinned by moral-political investments that need to be investigated (Fassin 2011, 221; on the governmentality of marriage and partner migration, see Bissenbakker 2019; D’Aoust 2013, 2018a). As a result, not only are contributors to the volume attuned to bureaucratic processes and policies that (re)produce and hang on specific relations of power, but they also interrogate or acknowledge the production, circulation and appropriation of norms and values, sensibilities and emotions that account for how it is treated at a given moment, both in the public sphere and in private actions (Fassin and Kobelinsky 2012, 447). Without necessarily resorting to a strict governmental analysis as an overarching theoretical framework, each contribution highlights different power relations at play in the constellations formed by the key elements of security, citizenship, and rights and ponders the ordering process they create or entail. Each of the contributors was thus asked to reflect on the ways this constellation takes shape in their respective study and how values, emotions, or affect come to matter.¹²

This engagement with affect and emotions warrants an important precision. These two concepts are not synonyms, and mobilizing one term or the other certainly suggests different orientations and interests, especially when it comes to the role that bodies and intentionality play in social relations (Schmitz and Ahmed 2014). To be sure, both terms have been much debated across disciplines, notably history (Gammerl, Nielsen, and Pernau 2019; Pernau 2019), sociology (Clough and Halley 2007), and feminist and queer theory (Gregg and Seigworth 2010; Ahmed 2004). They raise several issues, particularly from a multidisciplinary perspective. Privileging one term over the other involves taking a stand on epistemological and ontological issues that cannot be easily resolved among researchers coming from various backgrounds. Two remain unavoidable: the need to discuss how affect should be conceived as a social and biological force, or not, and the need to clarify what is the relationship between affect and the body (e.g., is affect an individually experienced, pre-social intensity, or is it an intersubjective experience affecting the body from the outside?). While not all contributors share the same positions on these two crucial dimensions, all are committed to the idea that legislations, security discourses, and legal procedures affecting marriage migration management are anything but indifferent: [they are] full of passion and norms, of feelings and stereotypes (Fassin 2005, 366). All the contributors share the idea that the very constellation of citizenship, security, and rights is imbued with emotional components. All share the notion that emotions cannot be uncoupled from relations of power that characterize and permeate the social field; yet they highlight this concept by using the very theoretical background and vocabulary proper to their discipline to clarify what that entails for the constellation they bring to light, be it moral economies, affective governmentality, affect, or emotions. Whichever term contributors in this volume mobilize, they still localize it inside the framework of governmentality described above. Doing so enables them to examine how emotions and rationality intermingle in ways that put the body at the center of analysis.

Our concern with security and the management of an ordered circulation of people raises political and legal questions of various orders, making the links between citizenship and rights unavoidable. Indeed, all rights claims today are based on citizenship (Arendt [1951] 1973). But as scholars of citizenship studies appreciate, citizenship is not limited to questions pertaining to the acquisition of a formal legal status. As the booming literature on family migration has shown, an increase in more selective—rather than simply restrictive—policies regarding marriage and partner migration has created a heterogeneity of non-citizen statuses (Schweitzer 2015, 2133). A complex stratification of rights ensues, reflecting regimes of deservingness (Kristol and Dahinden 2020; Bonjour and Block 2016; Bonjour and de Hart 2013), rather than a dichotomous regime of citizens and denizens. Inside each of these legal regimes, elements affecting the recognition of who is a partner or not, and who can be granted which rights, include (but are not limited to) the relationship’s status (cohabitees, long-term partners, registered partners, fiancés, spouses, etc.); sexual orientations (heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, queer, etc.); the enactment of free movement rights (or not) as European Union (EU) citizens; and formal status as citizens, residents, or third-country nationals. If we add to these criteria other markers of belonging such as religion, ethnic background, family ties between family reunification applicants (such as second-degree cousins), education degree, or socioeconomic status, we quickly see that concerns over citizenship and civic stratification cannot be distinguished from security regimes over marriage and partner migrants’ mobility practices (see the extensive literature reviews done by Bonjour and Block 2016; Bonjour and Kraler 2015; Kraler 2010; Schweitzer 2015).

We can look at the question of security and citizenship as one linked to the security or lack thereof resulting from the acquisition of a legal status. We can also look at it from a wide array of angles, including how concerns over securing the nation involve controlling the identity and practices of who can enter, and under what status, to restrain who belongs (Charsley et al. 2020; D’Aoust 2018b; Kim 2018; Horsti and Pellander 2015). Feminist and queer scholars have also called our attention to the importance of sexual citizenship (see Bonjour and de Hart 2021; Richardson 2018; Bell and Binnie 2000). Incidentally, we can refuse any formal, legal understanding of citizenship and rather be interested in the way marriage and partner migrants actively make their citizenship, their belonging (legally or not), possible—what authors such as Engin F. Isin (2008) have called acts of citizenship. (For examples on how this approach favors an emphasis on the migrants’ agency in the context of family reunification, see Odasso 2021; Scheel and Gutekunst 2019; Dyck 2018). Lest we forget, in spite of the state’s securitizing practices, people actively resist these, notably redeploying them to unexpected ends to play on the tensions cross-border marriages involve. Transnational marriages to Jews entrapped in Nazi Germany and Austria (Messinger 2012, 2018; Stoltzfus 1996) or undocumented migrants in Europe and the United States are only some examples of what Maïté Maskens (2017) labels humanitarian marriages. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas’s chapter (this volume) on the marriage relations of transgender hostesses is one such fascinating example of the complexity and creativity involved in securing one’s relationship, one’s legal status, and one’s self in spite of institutional and legal constraints. Pardis Mahdavi’s chapter (this volume), in contrast, poignantly documents how formal citizenship can be possible and yet leave individuals insecure about their future owing to the absence of feelings of belonging or home.

Policing Rights and Belonging: Histories and Legacies of Marriage Migration Management

The recent surge in scholarship on family reunification and marriage migration in Europe seems to stem from new laws that have led to intense public debates and legal challenges (e.g., the cousins law in Denmark [Rytter 2012], the increase in the minimum age for marriage or the minimum income requirement in the United Kingdom, and debates over fake paternities [paternités de papier] and gray marriages [mariages gris] in France). But such policies did not suddenly emerge: in their respective work, Betty de Hart (2014) and Helena Wray (2011) note that contemporary European migration law and national legislations do not necessarily entail a radical break from the colonial past. Several analyses spanning across fields as varied as law, history, and feminist and queer theory (Abrams 2012; Luibhéid 2002, 2008; de Hart 2014; Stoler 1995; Cott 2002; Pascoe 2009; Carter 2008) have long demonstrated how the policing of sexuality has been central to state concerns and cannot be dislodged from race and the politics of nationhood and citizenship. Far from being a mere private decision, marriage involves community claims, which can be welcomed or resisted by the state. State concerns and policies might historically have differed from current ones, but establishing and securing a certain order—especially a racial one—seems to be a constant.

Which social and political orders did some couples challenge? Betty de Hart, in her chapter, examines how the category of marriage of convenience has historically shifted in the twentieth century to serve Dutch nation-building purposes. Through legal and discourse analysis, she documents which legal provisions made possible the regulation of marriage and citizenship and which were enforced or not. But state policies are always met by resilience and resistance. Saskia Bonjour and Massilia Ourabah, in their chapter, engage in a short historical exercise to trace the development of family and gender norms in French parliamentary debates about family migration from the 1970s until the 1990s. This look at past parliamentary debates illustrates how the relation between security, citizenship, and rights is mobilized to normalize and reinforce certain forms of intimacies and conceptions of the family, with the aim to police belonging inside the French state. Ji-Yeon Yuh’s contribution challenges conventional historical narratives about the marriages of picture brides at the turn of the twentieth century and the war brides of the 1940s and 1950s. The women were often caught between empires (the United States, Japan, or China), and their narratives, in the genre of sinse taryeong (a Korean form of storytelling), give us a glimpse of the meanings they attach to their migration journey.

Intersectional Effects of Contemporary Marriage and Partner Migration Management: Stratification of Rights

Legal regimes and legislation are part of and produce relations of power. They establish frameworks for the (im)possible and (im)permissible. Yet, how they are deployed and enacted is different from one setting to another; it is also one thing to adopt policies and another to see them enforced. Scholars have argued that marriage and partner migration in the European context is best understood in a framework that emphasizes the stratification of rights, rather than the mere denying or possession of rights (Block and Bonjour 2013; Bonjour and Block 2016; Bonjour and Kraler 2015; Kraler 2010; Kofman 2002). Mobility or lack thereof can also activate or deny rights: a European activating her right to free movement and residing in another European country can be reunited with a non-European spouse, whereas another European who has not activated that right can be prevented from reuniting with a non-European spouse in her own country (see Wray, Kofman, and Simic 2021; Staver 2013).

The regulation and policing of marriage and partner migration often reproduces dichotomies between love and interests, between family and labor, and between men and women. This division between family and labor was notably historically enshrined in the United Kingdom’s primary purpose rule, which required non-British spouses to prove that their marriage’s primary purpose was not to win a right of residence (Wray 2011, 2015a, and 2015b). We can thus ponder whether right stratification is a deliberate political strategy to achieve certain ends or whether it is the unexpected result of specific practices and legislation. Examining marriage and partner migration policies in four countries (Great Britain, Denmark, France, and the United States), Helena Wray, in her chapter, claims that their reach and impacts go well beyond the limited sphere of spousal and partner migration. Marriage and partner migration, she argues, enables social normative controls otherwise impossible to apply in other forms of migration: in the name of security (such as protecting the welfare state), it establishes the contours of a deserving family life and models of marriage, intimacy, and citizenship, using criteria that are also associated with