Marriage migration, transnational couples and their families

This study examines gender differences in migration's effect on young adult’s marital timing and spousal choice in Nepal. Unique and detailed monthly and yearly data on the timing and sequence of marriage and migration allows me to separate out premarital migration from marital migration for women, important in addressing contemporaneous nature of migration and marriage in a patrilocal society.
I utilize information on how the young respondents’ spouse were chosen- either solely by themselves, solely by parents, or by a joint decision to make distinction between three types of marital decision-making.
Preliminary results show that although migration delays marriage, young women get married upon return and with joint decision s made about their choice of spouse. In a society where both migration of single woman and late marriage is frowned upon, this result indicates positive changes in gender norms and ideology around women’s marriage and migration in Nepali society.

One key contemporary population flow is the migration of Indian software professionals. In the early 2000s, First World market demands resulted in some governments fast-tracking migration of highly-skilled software engineers, but the global economy has seen the return of these migrants. This paper examines the impact of transnational migration on relationships and marriages, focusing on the engineers of the network age. The work adopts a transnational approach using multi-sited ethnography carried out in India and the United Kingdom, to follow the migratory experiences of transnational couples, as well as their families left behind. A central theme of this paper relates to hierarchical notions of power and how migration challenges traditional local structures (gender, age, caste, ethnic identity and wealth), and how national and global structures such as nation-states and multinational corporations influence marriageability, family structures and relationships. The paper finds that migration differentially affected the ‘marriage market’ of male and female software engineers. Migration has brought about re-negotiation of traditional values and expectations within transnational marriages, and is challenging the nature of intragenerational relations, and kith and kin networks

Migration to the city or abroad has been adapted as a livelihood strategy by village families in rural Java Indonesia. Adult children support their parents’ economy while husbands or wives left their spouses and children in the village to make ends meet. In term of rural-urban migration within Indonesia, migrants prefer to migrate in non-permanent basis in the form of circulation, weekly or monthly, while international contract workers are naturally in inviduals basis. This living arrangement choice of migrants created a phenomenon of divided households between migrants in the destination areas and the rest of family left behind in the villages. The wives or husbands work and/or maintain the children in the villages, while the husbands or wives work in the city or abroad. The phenomenon of home divided is universal, as a consequence of migration. People migrate from less develop economic regions or countries to the more advance economic areas. The phenomenon of divided home has significant impacts upon household structure and functioning in origin and destination regions or countries, and family solidity. This paper is based on secondary sources of migration and family studies conducted in rural Java, Indonesia in the last twenty years.

This paper uses data from the first wave of the New Immigrant Survey to analyze assortative marriage among immigrants recently admitted to legal permanent residence (LPR) in the U.S. We selected currently married respondents and estimated the probabilities that they will be married to spouses who have the same or higher levels of education. We distinguish between marriages that happened before and after arrival in the U.S. and marriages to U.S.-born spouses. Our models control characteristics like education, age at marriage, number of marriages, skin color, region of origin, religion, and basis for obtaining LPR. Preliminary results show that education has a strong positive effect on educational homogamy. We find that the likelihood of educational homogamy for women and men differs significantly by region of origin, religion, type of green card sponsorship, having married before migration, and being married to a U.S. Citizen.

This paper asks how transnational marriage impacts the demographic future of the Korean minority in northeast China. Abnormally high male birthrates in many Asian countries since the 1970s are predicted to cause disruptions in all areas of social life (Hesketh et al 2011). Yet South Korea was the first to address this nationally, partly due to its earlier uptake of sex-selection technology. In the early 1990s, faced with hundreds of thousands of aging bachelors and a plummeting birthrate, the state began funding men to seek brides overseas (Freeman 2011). The largest group of foreign brides came from China’s ethnic Korean minority, who live concentrated in the far northeastern Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture. The Korean Chinese have a population of just 2.6 million, but since 1992 over 100,000 women have left for marriage in South Korea (Lee 2008). Fertility in Yanbian declined sharply in response, while sending-households receive considerable remittances. This creates a double-bind for migrant-sending communities: economic and social remittances boost the local economy, yet female depopulation threatens their demographic future. Combining economic and demographic data with ethnographic fieldwork in Yanbian and Seoul, I examine long-term social repercussions of marriage migration as a response to gender imbalance.

Incorporating the intersectionality approach from feminist theories and the transnational framework from the international migration literature, this study explores how gender dynamics at the family, community, and societal levels intersect with the migration process, and how such “transnational intersectionality” impacts the health trajectories of a gendered migration flow. In Taiwan and Korea, the VMMs represent the largest ethnic group without ethnic ties to the host societies. Their migration illustrates a gendered migration process that intersects the social stratification based on ethnicity, social class, and capitalist globalization. In collaboration with local community centers, I conducted 54 qualitative interviews and four focus groups in both rural and urban settings. By examining how gender is constructed across the borders at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels, the results show that transnational intersections have differential and accumulative impacts on VMMs’ health trajectories, and is influenced by immigration and integration policies. This study exemplifies the health consequences of “enforced bachelorhood” in patriarchal societies with strong son preference, informs the literature of gender, migration, and development, and deserves attentions from immigration and health policy makers along the Pacific Rim.

Aim of this research is a one new form of marriage – the territorial separated marriage generated by international and interregional long-time migration. Now some part of migrants have two (or more) families: the first is in the motherland and the alternative – on the migration territory. What are the reasons of this situation? What are the profit and problems men and women have? What about children?
A new marriage on recipient territory often does not destroyed a first marriage on the motherland. It is because the migrant has not possibility removing the first family to the job land. At the same time the job of the working migrant is the main source of income to both families.
Background of this research is the theory of demographic transition, the theory of social stratification and social mobility, analysis of the international labor market and labor migration and the model of balance outlays/income of the generation offered by author.
The research method is the analysis the open statistic data, media data (including Internet source) and the results of investigating activity published by another authors and researching centers.

Our understanding of the main drivers of the process of families’ separation and reunification due to international migration remains quite limited. In spite of the numerical importance of annual entries on family grounds to developed countries, as well as the frequent legal reforms affecting the migrants’ right to reunify, adequate data to empirically examine this issue are still scarce. The few quantitative analyses available so far utilize data on migrants collected only in the receiving countries. By omitting migrants who returned home to reunify with their relatives there, the results of these studies are likely to be seriously biased. The main goal of this paper is to analyse the process of couples’ reunification among Congolese and Senegalese migrants in Europe, taking advantage of the international structure of the MAFE dataset. The comparative approach allow us to better understand when and why some migrants decide to reunify with their partners in Europe, while others remain separated until they return to their countries of origin.

Indonesia is a large multi cultural country. Development of transportation infrastructure, social, education and economic opportunities encourage people to move not only in the same sub district or regency or province but also moves across provinces.Hence intermarriage between individual with different ethnic background is bound to happen. Using the Indonesia Family Live Survey (IFLS), this paper explore the level of matching of the ethnic, religion, education and age of spouses and family background of three cohorts: born before 1962, born 1962-1976 and born after 1976. The paper also examines the correlation of the matching of the characteristic of the spouse with mental health condition of the person. The descriptive statistics and multivariate regression used to explore matching characteristic and family background of the spouse and its correlation with mental health controlling for social condition of the individual, household and community. Different Ethnic group of spouse significatly increase felt bothered by things that usually don’t bother, felt depressed, felt fearful and felt lonely. Living in urban and outside Java worsen mental health condition of couple with unmatched characteristics

Previous research indicates that marital decisions reflect an intersection of cultural, economic and structural factors. Further, immigrant marital patterns are considered a measure of structural assimilation. Immigrants, relative to natives, experience distinct marriage markets. Immigrant mating options are shaped by immigration laws in addition to socioeconomic and cultural factors. This study using the 2003 New Immigrant Survey (NIS) examines educational assortative mating as measured by homogamy, hypergamy and hypogamy for new legal permanent residents. Preliminary results show the significance of mode of entry as measured by visa status on the likelihood of entering into a homogamous or hypergamous or hypogamous union. Individuals with employer based visa are more likely to marry homogamously relative to those who entered on spousal or diversity visas. Further, having received education in United States increases the likelihood of homogamy. The findings suggest the significance of immigration policies in shaping present and future family formation processes.