Transnational marriages and transnational marriage strategies: Explaining spouse selection among migrants

Who marries whom? Patterns of spouse selection among migrants have become a subject of debate in politics and the public arena, especially so because they are seen as indicators of the integration or non-integration of migrants. This paper first looks into a broad range of empirical studies dealing with the issue of migrants' marriages. Their results point to a consistent pattern: Many migrants choose spouses from their countries of origin. In order to analyse and explain such choices this paper uses the concept of transnational migration and transnational social spaces. Within this framework it identifies three major reasons and motivations: first, obligations of family solidarity; second, prospects of upward social mobility: third, hopes of re-shaping the power balance within the couple relationship. Seen in this light such choices are not the product of a rigid clinging to tradition or a resistance to integration. Rather they present a hybrid, a mixing, where traditional patterns of behaviour are being adapted to the ambitions, demands and constraints of life in transnational social spaces.