In the Name of Love: Marriage Migration, Governmentality, and Technologies of Love

Abstract

The past 10 years have seen an increase in legislation pertaining to marriage migration in Europe. Such attention betrays various concerns and anxieties that intersect not only with issues of risk management, rights, and citizenship, but also with less tangible dimensions such as emotions, which become embedded in legal as well as in surveillance practices. Emotions such as love are integral to the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculation, and tactics that Foucault identified as part of governmental processes; the latter should not necessarily be equated with (and limited to) rationalized technocratic processes detached from emotional components. Technologies of love are central to the governmentality of marriage migration; as modes of subjectification and governing practice, they connect intimacy with citizenship. More than the manifestation of the rationalization of a specific emotion, technologies of love allow for an exploration of what an engagement with emotions such as love does to governmentality. Illustrations of the “attachment requirement” in Denmark, and the case of “Catgate” in Great Britain, show that technologies of love play a significant role in stirring and disciplining specific migration flows (what kind of marriage migrants the state welcomes or keeps at bay), but also in challenging, even if inadvertently, those policies and practices designed to gauge “true” relationships.

From Work to Welfare: Institutional Arrangements Shaping Turkish Marriage Migrants’ Gendered Trajectories into a New Society

“…Our reason for selecting the period of 1994–1999 is tied to marriage migrants’ ability to enter Denmark: After 1999 (in 2000, 2002 and 2003), major changes in the rules regulating marriage migration reduced the former ease with which people of Turkish descent raised in Denmark could bring back marriage migrant spouses from Turkey (Schultz‐Nielsen and Tranæs ; D'Aoust ; Liversage and Rytter ). Due to data limitations, our analysis ends in 2006, before both the upheavals of the global economic crisis of 2007–2008 (which strongly affected the employment of immigrants; see Dustmann, Glitz, and Vogel ), and before substantial changes to the unemployment insurance system made it less generous in 2010.…”

Language as a new instrument of border control: the regulation of marriage migration from Morocco to Germany

“…Germany, France, Austria and the UK have followed the Dutch example. Over the last decade, marriage migration to Europe and North America has become a specific target of restrictions and control (Block 2012;D'Aoust 2013) and it is now part of more general trends in European migration policies concerning the externalisation of border controls, the deceleration of migration processes, and the hierarchisation and selection of migrants following the utilitarian logic of a neoliberal management of migration.…”

Regulating Spousal Migration through Canada's Multiple Border Strategy: The Gendered and Racialized Effects of Structurally Embedded Borders

“…In October 2012, the Canadian government introduced Conditional Permanent Resident status (conditional PR or CPR) as a means to “crack down” on marriage fraud. Echoing policy developments in the United States, the United Kingdom, and countries in western Europe (D'Aoust ; Wray ; Medina ), conditional PR required newly sponsored spouses and partners (henceforth referred to as spouses/partners for brevity) to cohabitate with their sponsor for two years in order to demonstrate the authenticity of their relationship . As illustrated in Minister Jason Kenney's speech above, the Conservative government promoted Conditional PR as one of several policy instruments targeting immigration fraud.…”