For Better or For Worse: Vietnamese International Marriages in the New Global Economy

Introduction: Marriage and Migration in the New Global Economy

1 Introduction Marriage and Migration in the New Global Economy International marriage is currently the primary reason why people migrate to the United States (Rumbaut 1997; United States Department of Homeland Security 2006; USINS 2002). As figure 1.1 illustrates, of all the immigrants entering the United States in 2005, 58 percent came through various routes of family sponsorship.1 Of all family-sponsored immigrants, as shown in figure 1.2, the largest single mode of sponsorship was marriage with either a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident. Nearly half of all family-sponsored immigrants arrived as international marriage migrants in 2005.2 These marriage migrants constituted over a quarter of all the immigrants who entered, almost triple the proportion (a mere 9 percent) of marriage migrants who came to the United States in the 1960s. Women make up more than 65 percent of all marriage migrants. Whereas marriage migrants make up about a quarter of all men who enter the United States each year, female marriage migrants constitute over 40 percent of all women who enter. Furthermore, individuals of the same ethnicity currently constitute an estimated two-thirds of all marriage migration couples (United States Department of Homeland Security 2006; USINS 1999a; USINS 1999b). Although international marriages and other family-related factors explain why the majority of contemporary migrants come to the United States each year, few have studied that side INTRO.qxd 10/30/07 9:29 AM Page 1 F o r B e t t e r o r F o r Wo r s e 2 1-2. Family-Sponsored Immigrants in 2005 (Total  649,2001) Source: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, 2005, table 7. 24,729 292,741 66,542 65,149 177,087 50,000 100,000 150,000 200,000 250,000 300,000 350,000 Unmarried sons and daugthers of U.S. citizens and their children Spouses of residents & U.S. Citizens Children and unmarried sons and daugthers of permanent residents Married sons and daugthers of U.S. citizens and their spouses and children Brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens (at least 21 years of age) and their spouses and children Children, parents and orphans of U.S. citizens Number of immigrants Categories of Family-sponsored immigrants 22,953 1-1. Percent of Immigrants by Categories of Admission in 2005 Total Number of Immigrants: 1,122,373 Source: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, 2005, table 7. 0.22 0.13 0.07 0.58 0.10 0.20 0.30 0.40 0.50 0.60 0.70 Family sponsorship Employment Refugees and asylees Other immigrants Categories of Admission Percent of immigration. Issues of poverty, war, the search for jobs, and political asylum tend to dominate the field of contemporary migration studies. Consequently, we know very little about the INTRO.qxd 10/30/07 9:29 AM Page 2 dynamics of different contemporary international marriage migration streams, why it is that women are overwhelmingly the sponsored spouse, and why it is that immigrants are increasingly turning to their home countries for marriage partners. What we do know, or think we know, about marriage migration frequently focuses on extremely dichotomous images of women as either the “helpless victims of controlling U.S. men” or as scheming agents, “shrewd foreigners out for a green card and a free meal ticket through marriage fraud and immigration scams that dupe innocent U.S. men” (Constable 2003, 13). Indeed, marriage choice in the West is frequently thought of in simplistic “either or” terms. That is to say, people are thought to marry to form an economic partnership, thus for material needs, or they marry for love, sex, and romance to fulfill emotional needs (Kalmijn 1998). This bipolar view is, of course, highly problematic in the context of international and immigration communities. I aim to complicate this picture so as to provide a more nuanced portrait of the ways in which economic activities and intimate relations are, in numerous ways, forged and sustained by each other in the contemporary global arena. Like Constable, I argue against a “dichotomous or discontinuous view of love and opportunism that treats pragmatic concerns as incompatible with emotional ones” (ibid., 11). In this way, I join dialogues raised by feminist ethnographers in recent times who have shifted away from simple hierarchies and dichotomies to more nuanced “problematization of multiple spaces...