Transnational marriage
Encyclopedia
A transnational marriage is a marriage
between two people from different countries. A variety of special issues arise in marriages between people from different countries, including those related to citizenship
and culture, which add complexity and challenges to these kinds of relationships.
In an age of increasing globalization
, where a growing number of people have ties to networks of people and places across the globe, rather than to a current geographic location, people are increasingly marrying across national boundaries. Transnational marriage is a by-product of the movement and migration of people.
Transnational marriage may occur when someone from one country
visits or lives in another country for school, work, political asylum, refuge, or due to their family relocating. In general terms, reasons for transnational marriage are:
Obstacles to transnational marriages:
However, there are many barriers and restrictions to cross-cultural, inter-tribal or racial, and particularly transnational, marriages. People tend to marry those similar to them, some even preferring to marry first cousins, whom they trust. In an interesting twist, transnational arranged marriage between cousins
or relatives occur more often in some places with migration and family reunification
policies, as some people still want their culture and family when marrying, even in a distant place.
and the Laws of Manu are two religious historical documents which give some insight into the views on transnational marriage in antiquity. In the Bible, Abraham's God warns the Israelites not to marry people from other nations for fear that they would then proceed to worship the gods of the other nations.
There are several instances of transnational marriages in the Bible, such as Joseph
being given Egyptian wives by Pharaoh, Rahab of Jericho
marrying one of the Israelite spies she hid, Ruth the Moabite taking care of her mother-in-law Naomi, and King Solomon
marrying Pharaoh's daughter, as well as many other foreign wives. King Solomon married to make alliances and keep the peace, and the others because they lived by each other. However, the difference in reaction to the transnational marriages is how the newcomers responded to the Abrahamic God.. King Solomon was punished by God for facilitating his wives' worship of their own gods in Israel and then worshipping alongside them. Intermarriage was discouraged if there was any difference in religious practice or belief. The book of Ezra
tells of the response of the Jewish exiles to either separate from their foreign wives they had married in Babylon
or be separated from the community of exiles when the exiles were trying to turn back to the Abrahamic God.
The Laws of Manu, a religious document for the Indo-Aryan
Brahmins invading India
, speaks of how to keep oneself clean but also intermarry with the indigenous peoples in order to create a caste system. A Nepali anthropologist writes on how a Brahmin man might marry four wives of different castes, and keep all the eating and living quarters of his different caste wives and children separate. His children and grandchildren, born to women of lower castes, will have even lower status and not be taught the laws. The only social mobility is downward.
Similarly, although no longer specifically due to transnational marriage, the interracial
sexual contact in the Americas produced a system that defined social status by skin color, and is still followed by some people, but in particular those whom it subjugated. People would marry those with lighter skin color to keep their social status and were against marrying anyone of "lower" status, particularly around the time of belief that certain people were of a superior race than others.
A slightly different perspective of interracial or transnational marriage is from those who tend to marry their cousins, sometimes even first cousins. They do so in order keep the family together socially and economically, thus disproving of marriage outside. Recently, this practice has become technically transnational due to differences in citizenship, even though the people are still family. An example of transnational marriage that kept the family together was among European royalty
. Queen Victoria's grandchildren were all over Europe, keeping the royalty together. She was referred to as the "grandmother of Europe." However, some alliances were to their detriment, as due to them, they had to go to war, (in World War I
). More recent examples are from a mass migration from the less developed regions of the world to the more developed regions, helped by the policies of family reunification. A fairly common practice among South Asian immigrants to the UK or USA is to have arranged marriages to someone back "home," in order to keep the culture and traditions within their family.
policies have upset some people in host countries, as people are less likely to assimilate if they continue to marry people from their home countries, thus keeping their cultures alive in the host cultures. Others are suspicious of transnational marriages, as they think the non-citizen spouse may use their marriage only to obtain legal status in the host country. Still others find their families torn apart if one spouse is detained or deported for legal reasons. There are many legal barriers and hurdles to cross in transnational marriage, as well as being allowed to remain living together in the same country.
Others decide on a transnational marriage without having lived long in their new country. Traveling has resulted in transnational relationships, marriages, and even families, although it is not known how common such results are. A New York Times article cites someone who found a partner through couch surfing. Couch surfing is a way for people to stay cheaply at another person's home, allowing the traveler to see the life of locals when visiting a new place.
The grounds given for discouraging transnational marriage are that:
The grounds given for encouraging transnational marriage are that:
Marriage
Marriage is a social union or legal contract between people that creates kinship. It is an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged in a variety of ways, depending on the culture or subculture in which it is found...
between two people from different countries. A variety of special issues arise in marriages between people from different countries, including those related to citizenship
Citizenship
Citizenship is the state of being a citizen of a particular social, political, national, or human resource community. Citizenship status, under social contract theory, carries with it both rights and responsibilities...
and culture, which add complexity and challenges to these kinds of relationships.
In an age of increasing globalization
Globalization
Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...
, where a growing number of people have ties to networks of people and places across the globe, rather than to a current geographic location, people are increasingly marrying across national boundaries. Transnational marriage is a by-product of the movement and migration of people.
Transnational marriage may occur when someone from one country
Country
A country is a region legally identified as a distinct entity in political geography. A country may be an independent sovereign state or one that is occupied by another state, as a non-sovereign or formerly sovereign political division, or a geographic region associated with a previously...
visits or lives in another country for school, work, political asylum, refuge, or due to their family relocating. In general terms, reasons for transnational marriage are:
- Becoming attracted to a citizen of one's host country and marrying them. This is usually a cross-culturalCross-culturalcross-cultural may refer to*cross-cultural studies, a comparative tendency in various fields of cultural analysis*cross-cultural communication, a field of study that looks at how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate...
marriage, although there are times in which that citizen may be from the same cultureCultureCulture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
. Marrying a citizen of the host country may help in becoming a citizen of that land and staying there permanently. Sometimes the host culture is the one with which the person identifies, and thus desires to marry someone of that culture rather than someone from their "home" culture. - Becoming attracted to and marrying a citizen of yet another country who is also visiting or living in the host country.
- Having become a citizen of the host country, the person may go back to their homeland, marry a person from their home country, sometimes through arranged marriageArranged marriageAn arranged marriage is a practice in which someone other than the couple getting married makes the selection of the persons to be wed, meanwhile curtailing or avoiding the process of courtship. Such marriages had deep roots in royal and aristocratic families around the world...
, and then return to the country in which they are a citizen. This may come as a result of missing home, family, and culture, and desiring to have such in one's life. One may then bring one's spouse to their new country of citizenship through family reunificationFamily reunificationFamily reunification is a recognized reason for immigration in many countries. The presence of one or more family members in a certain country, therefore, enables the rest of the family to immigrate to that country as well....
provisions in immigration lawImmigration lawImmigration law refers to national government policies which control the phenomenon of immigration to their country.Immigraton law, regarding foreign citizens, is related to nationality law, which governs the legal status of people, in matters such as citizenship...
. - Being a seasoned traveler, a person might marry someone who has the shared experience of living amidst different cultures, regardless of citizenship. One term used to label such people is Third Culture Kids.
Obstacles to transnational marriages:
- Citizenship of two or more nations - one or both spouses must change citizenship or become a dual citizen. Changing one's citizenship can be a long process, and for some it is an ordeal of negotiating the laws and language of a new country.
- CultureCultureCulture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
- Learning how to live with a new spouse where cultural assumptions and norms may vary greatly. - LanguageLanguageLanguage may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
History
In more ancient times, some marriages between distinctly different tribes and nations were due to royalty trying to form alliances with or to influence other kingdoms or to dissuade marauders or slave traders. More recently, transnational marriages are due to globalization, with migration of labor, increased communication, and many more situations where foreigners come into contact with each other. It is also more common in some areas where class and tribal separations are becoming less strict. If one shares values that transcend culture, then it is easier to get married across cultures.However, there are many barriers and restrictions to cross-cultural, inter-tribal or racial, and particularly transnational, marriages. People tend to marry those similar to them, some even preferring to marry first cousins, whom they trust. In an interesting twist, transnational arranged marriage between cousins
Cousin
In kinship terminology, a cousin is a relative with whom one shares one or more common ancestors. The term is rarely used when referring to a relative in one's immediate family where there is a more specific term . The term "blood relative" can be used synonymously and establishes the existence of...
or relatives occur more often in some places with migration and family reunification
Family reunification
Family reunification is a recognized reason for immigration in many countries. The presence of one or more family members in a certain country, therefore, enables the rest of the family to immigrate to that country as well....
policies, as some people still want their culture and family when marrying, even in a distant place.
Historical Attitudes
The BibleBible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
and the Laws of Manu are two religious historical documents which give some insight into the views on transnational marriage in antiquity. In the Bible, Abraham's God warns the Israelites not to marry people from other nations for fear that they would then proceed to worship the gods of the other nations.
There are several instances of transnational marriages in the Bible, such as Joseph
Joseph (Hebrew Bible)
Joseph is an important character in the Hebrew bible, where he connects the story of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in Canaan to the subsequent story of the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt....
being given Egyptian wives by Pharaoh, Rahab of Jericho
Rahab
Rahab, was, according to the Book of Joshua, a woman who lived in Jericho in the Promised Land and assisted the Israelites in capturing the city...
marrying one of the Israelite spies she hid, Ruth the Moabite taking care of her mother-in-law Naomi, and King Solomon
Solomon
Solomon , according to the Book of Kings and the Book of Chronicles, a King of Israel and according to the Talmud one of the 48 prophets, is identified as the son of David, also called Jedidiah in 2 Samuel 12:25, and is described as the third king of the United Monarchy, and the final king before...
marrying Pharaoh's daughter, as well as many other foreign wives. King Solomon married to make alliances and keep the peace, and the others because they lived by each other. However, the difference in reaction to the transnational marriages is how the newcomers responded to the Abrahamic God.. King Solomon was punished by God for facilitating his wives' worship of their own gods in Israel and then worshipping alongside them. Intermarriage was discouraged if there was any difference in religious practice or belief. The book of Ezra
Ezra
Ezra , also called Ezra the Scribe and Ezra the Priest in the Book of Ezra. According to the Hebrew Bible he returned from the Babylonian exile and reintroduced the Torah in Jerusalem...
tells of the response of the Jewish exiles to either separate from their foreign wives they had married in Babylon
Babylon
Babylon was an Akkadian city-state of ancient Mesopotamia, the remains of which are found in present-day Al Hillah, Babil Province, Iraq, about 85 kilometers south of Baghdad...
or be separated from the community of exiles when the exiles were trying to turn back to the Abrahamic God.
The Laws of Manu, a religious document for the Indo-Aryan
Indo-Aryans
Indo-Aryan is an ethno-linguistic term referring to the wide collection of peoples united as native speakers of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-Iranian family of Indo-European languages...
Brahmins invading India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
, speaks of how to keep oneself clean but also intermarry with the indigenous peoples in order to create a caste system. A Nepali anthropologist writes on how a Brahmin man might marry four wives of different castes, and keep all the eating and living quarters of his different caste wives and children separate. His children and grandchildren, born to women of lower castes, will have even lower status and not be taught the laws. The only social mobility is downward.
Similarly, although no longer specifically due to transnational marriage, the interracial
Miscegenation
Miscegenation is the mixing of different racial groups through marriage, cohabitation, sexual relations, and procreation....
sexual contact in the Americas produced a system that defined social status by skin color, and is still followed by some people, but in particular those whom it subjugated. People would marry those with lighter skin color to keep their social status and were against marrying anyone of "lower" status, particularly around the time of belief that certain people were of a superior race than others.
A slightly different perspective of interracial or transnational marriage is from those who tend to marry their cousins, sometimes even first cousins. They do so in order keep the family together socially and economically, thus disproving of marriage outside. Recently, this practice has become technically transnational due to differences in citizenship, even though the people are still family. An example of transnational marriage that kept the family together was among European royalty
Royal family
A royal family is the extended family of a king or queen regnant. The term imperial family appropriately describes the extended family of an emperor or empress, while the terms "ducal family", "grand ducal family" or "princely family" are more appropriate to describe the relatives of a reigning...
. Queen Victoria's grandchildren were all over Europe, keeping the royalty together. She was referred to as the "grandmother of Europe." However, some alliances were to their detriment, as due to them, they had to go to war, (in World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
). More recent examples are from a mass migration from the less developed regions of the world to the more developed regions, helped by the policies of family reunification. A fairly common practice among South Asian immigrants to the UK or USA is to have arranged marriages to someone back "home," in order to keep the culture and traditions within their family.
Modern attitudes
Even today, there is a mixed reaction to transnational marriage in some areas, especially as it continues to spread. Family reunificationFamily reunification
Family reunification is a recognized reason for immigration in many countries. The presence of one or more family members in a certain country, therefore, enables the rest of the family to immigrate to that country as well....
policies have upset some people in host countries, as people are less likely to assimilate if they continue to marry people from their home countries, thus keeping their cultures alive in the host cultures. Others are suspicious of transnational marriages, as they think the non-citizen spouse may use their marriage only to obtain legal status in the host country. Still others find their families torn apart if one spouse is detained or deported for legal reasons. There are many legal barriers and hurdles to cross in transnational marriage, as well as being allowed to remain living together in the same country.
Third Culture Kids
Immigrants may also take their families with them, meaning that their children grow up in different lands, learning a different culture, often feeling more at home in the host country than their "home" country. These children, called Third Culture Kids tend to often feel affinity to those who have also lived in more than one country and culture, and tend to marry people of diverse backgrounds, regardless of nationality and citizenship.Others decide on a transnational marriage without having lived long in their new country. Traveling has resulted in transnational relationships, marriages, and even families, although it is not known how common such results are. A New York Times article cites someone who found a partner through couch surfing. Couch surfing is a way for people to stay cheaply at another person's home, allowing the traveler to see the life of locals when visiting a new place.
One Debate: Should National Laws Discourage or Encourage Transnational Marriage?
Currently, it can be legally difficult to have a transnational marriage. There are many barriers, for example in Indonesia it can be very difficult for the married couple if the husband is not Indonesian. As a result of increasing transnational marriage, policy makers in various countries are starting to consider whether they should discourage or encourage transnational marriage.The grounds given for discouraging transnational marriage are that:
- False marriages occur to gain citizenship or conduct human trafficking.
- The marriages are cross-cultural and thus children or spouses may not be as loyal or patriotic to the new country.
- There is a lack of assimilation and creation of ghettos if second and third generation immigrants are still marrying persons from the country of their ancestors.
The grounds given for encouraging transnational marriage are that:
- Transnational marriage reconnects extended families or even persons of similar backgrounds that are living all over the globe.
- It helps relations between countries by strengthening trade and contact, or in case of war, enables one country to know more about the other (case of Kibei or Japanese-Americans during WWII).
- People are increasingly marrying across national boundaries and harsh laws just tear families apart.
See also
- International child abductionInternational child abductionThe term international child abduction is generally synonymous with international parental kidnapping, child snatching, and child stealing. However, the more precise legal usage of international child abduction originates in private international law and refers to the illegal removal of children...
- Interfaith marriage
- Interracial marriageInterracial marriageInterracial marriage occurs when two people of differing racial groups marry. This is a form of exogamy and can be seen in the broader context of miscegenation .-Legality of interracial marriage:In the Western world certain jurisdictions have had regulations...