Bureaucracy, romance and the dichotomy of the il/legitimate marriage

Please accept my humblest apologies. I promised you a blog post every two weeks, and I’ve already slipped up on post number two. I unexpectedly had to take the ferry to the mainland last week to finally put a cap on two months of bureaucratic issues that have that have dragged out me being able to get my Japanese driver’s license. This is quite a fitting excuse, as this week, we are delving into the bureaucracy of marriage across nations, and asking the question of what it is that makes a marriage “legitimate”.

In my first blog post, I touched on marriage as a legal entity, and something that can be used to exclude people. I have also mentioned my own reasons for getting married: primarily so that my partner could come and live with me in Japan. He has wanted to live in Japan for a long time, and I didn’t want to leave Japan just yet. Also, we wanted to live together. However, had we been getting married for the visa without the love part, our marriage would have been viewed differently. Or perhaps, as a middle class white man marrying a white woman with a long term but not permanent teaching visa, we would still easily have been able to gloss over these issues. No one would be suspicious that our relationship might be a “fraudulent” one. But had he been a working class man from a lower-GDP Asian country like China, Thailand, the Philippines or Indonesia, marrying a Japanese citizen or anyone with a permanent visa, the situation would have been markedly different. Even if the two people marrying were in love and had been together for a long time, they would have to jump through multiple flaming bureaucratic hoops to prove it. It is telling that as someone with a temporary teaching visa to Japan, all I have to hand in to the Japanese immigration bureau as proof of our relationship is a marriage certificate. If I was Japanese, however, thus meaning that my spouse would potentially be spending the rest of their life in Japan, we would have to hand in multiple forms of proof in the way of photos, messages or anything we could dredge up as proof that our relationship was a romantic one, thus making it legitimate and reason enough to grant my spouse a visa.

Similarly, if you come from a so-called “developing country” and you are trying to marry someone in Europe or North America or even South Africa, the procedure would not be so simple. Most countries do not explicitly discriminate against those from particular countries in their spousal visa procedures. For example, in South Africa, if any foreigner wants to qualify for a spousal visa they must go for an interview at Home Affairs and answer questions about their relationship history and feelings for one another. However, while I read on one blog that the interview lasted only five minutes, somehow I doubt that if the foreigner was, say, Congolese, the interview would still be this short. Although laws may not be explicitly discriminatory, discrimination can turn up in bureaucracy in all kinds of little ways that can make it clear to a person that they are not welcome. And in many cases, attempts to follow correct procedures even for those in committed romantic relationships, result in orders to return to their home countries. As Evan Stewart writes on the fantastic website There's Research on That, "history shows inequality can thrive in low level bureaucracy, sometimes in spite of national policy".

According to Kringelbach (2013) who conducted research into the policing of cross-nationality marriages in France, since the mid-2000s, regulations on marriages between EU and non-EU citizens have been getting more and more stringent. In the words of one consulate employee, officials went from “vigilant” to “obsessed with fraud”. Kringelbach argues that this legal apparatus of exclusion is not just an issue of economics and politics, but closely connected to the idea of a nation’s “community of belonging” a la Benedict Anderson. In other words, legal discrimination goes hand in hand with social discrimination, where in Europe, immigrants, particularly those from African countries, are never considered to really be able to belong to a European state. Kringelbach investigates a number of specific cases, showing how relationships between French and African citizens are viewed as immediately suspicious, even being referred to in the racialized term “grey marriages”. But at the same time, marriages within immigrant communities are viewed as failures to assimilate. Thus, policing of marriage is just one more symptom of the way immigrants and their descendants in Europe, specifically black African immigrants, are shown that they can never be welcome.

Clearly, the dichotomy of legitimate vs. illegitimate marriages is not just a semantic one or even merely a social construct. It is not just to do with our ideas of what marriage is and our societal views of love and partnership. It is a weapon of the state that is used in order to exclude certain people from certain places.

The fact that nation states can use marriage as a tool of exclusion, however, conveniently utilizes the current formulation of it as something romantic. But this is a recent formulation: it was only in the 18th century with the Enlightenment that the idea of marrying for love gained traction in the west. Today, marrying for love is a pervasive idea across the globe, although not necessarily the default in all places. But even in places where it is considered the default, people get married for reasons other than love all the time: for financial security, to please their parents, to raise children, and many others. But these are not scrutinized or policed in the same way as visa marriages are. Nor are marriages between Europeans of different countries or anyone considered “culturally compatible” (read: marriage between white people) subjected to the same scrutiny as inter-racial transnational marriages. The policing of marriages across borders is directly related to whether the people crossing these borders are seen as potentially "legitimate" residents of a country or not, which is directly related to where they are coming from. (I should also mention that the marriage visa path, coupled with the desperation of people who seeking visas or money, is a recipe for various kinds of exploitation and abuse, but that is another post for another day.)

How different countries define legitimate marriages also affects who may get spousal visas. For example, while only about 25 countries worldwide allow same-sex partners to get married, there are others that still recognize such marriages if they have occurred elsewhere. However, Japan is not one of these countries, meaning that if my partner had been a woman, she would not be able to join me in Japan by getting married, and I would be stuck again with the decision of whether to stay in Japan and continue a long-distance relationship, or go back sooner than I wanted. The USA Center for Immigration Studies claims that, “some couples are so grossly mismatched that officers don’t need see the couple in person” to determine that the marriage is an illegitimate one. But what is it that makes a couple “grossly mismatched”? The same article cites not having a common language in which to be able to communicate as one such indicator. I would certainly agree that it is probably not common for people who can’t speak to one another in a common language to fall in love, but that does not change the fact that this is an arbitrary, discriminatory and definitely not a foolproof way of determining whether a marriage is a "scam" or not.

Of course, "legitimacy" in marriage is not only defined in legal terms or ones to do with immigration. On the legal side, countries differ in terms of whether same-sex couples can get married, whether marriage can be between more than two people, and the age a person can get married. However, a marriage can be legal but still not seen as legitimate in the eyes of society or certain groups in society. For example, although in South Africa, same-sex couples can get legally married, many religious groups do not view these marriages as legitimate. At the same time, liberal, western individuals may not consider an arranged marriage legitimate as it is not based on romance. And regardless of the legal age of marriage, different societies have different ideas about what is an appropriate age to get married, as well as the appropriate time spent dating. On one hand, many people will knowingly shake their heads when 20-year-olds, or people who have only recently met decide to get married. On the other hand (in my opinion more disturbingly), in Japan, women over 25 who are not yet married are sometimes referred to as "leftover Christmas cake".

The supposed (il)legitimacy of a marriage can be a deeply personal matter of family relationships. It can be related to time, social context and cultural narratives. However, it can also be a deliberate policy of governments that uses the formulation of marriage as a romantic affair to exclude particular kinds of people from entering a country. And it is my suggestion that this indeterminacy around what makes a marriage (il)legitimate in people's minds makes petty discrimination (that can have monumental effects on people's lives) against vulnerable people much easier.

Bureaucracy might feel gross and infuriating for everyone, but for those of us with the privilege of not being marked "suspicious" from the get-go just because of our country of origin, the administrative minefield is a comparative walk in the park. Which certainly puts into perspective my angsty desire to figure out how I feel about my visa-and-love-marriage situation. At least I am free to have such anxieties, as I do not have to expend energy worrying about whether my I or my partner is going to get deported or not.

Further reading:

Stephanie Coontz. Marriage, a history: from obedience to intimacy or how love conquered marriage. Viking Penguin: 2005.

Helene Neveu Kringelbach. 'Mixed marriage', citizenship, and the policing of intimacy in contemporary France. University of Oxford, working papers: 2013.

Helen Stewart. Marriage, inequality and bureaucracy: The devil's in the DMV? The Society Pages, "There's Research On That": 2015.

David Seminara. Hello, I love you won't you tell me your name: Inside the green card marriage phenomenon. Center for Immigration Studies: 2008.

#spousalvisa #marriageofconvenience #transnationalmarriage #crossbordermarriage #discrimination #immigration #bureaucracy #visa #marriage