International Marriage Migration

The study of international marriages between Thai women and Singaporean men in Singapore aims to investigate the phenomenon of such marriages. The paper examines gender relations, influence of stereotypes, cultural and structural forces that guide Singaporean society, individual choices and expectations in a marriage in the present and the future. The study relies on qualitative research methods in particular in-depth interview with twenty couples in total. The main theories include, Inoue’s theory of international marriage, Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and Giddens’ structuration theory.

Based on the findings, there is a conflict in choices of mate selections and expectations in a marriage of such couples. These conflicting ideas have caused a point of contention and created an unhappy marriage for couples involved in international marriage. The lingering of such negative sentiments can prove to be catastrophic for these couples. However, these couples are simply not victims of their circumstance. Instead, they are active agents who continuously endeavour to make progress in their lives and social status as a couple.

Before I started writing this review, I was sitting in a conference where a Western student gave a presentation on the coffee drinking culture amongst university students in central Taipei. Café goers informed their interviewer that the shop was their home where they spent hours and hours sharing their travelling aspirations with each other in a place out of the reach of their families. Their interviewer, a seasoned traveller himself, dutifully documented the homeness attached by his Taiwanese contemporaries to cafés and was promptly converted to become a coffee drinker after his research. Brewed in the aroma of coffee, their feelings of home did not grow out of the usual links of geography or genealogy. Rather, the sense of homeness was rooted in the free imaginations that knew no boundaries. By leaving behind the home where they were born and bred, the interviewer and his interviewees built a temporary home in a commercial premise where ideas and ideals were washed down with coffee until they brewed homeness again in another temporary home at another café. Is this constitution of aspiration and exchange of shared dreams similar to the homeness constructed by Nieh Hualing's International Writing Program that Dr Hsin-Chin Hsieh's dissertation introduces to us (pp. 141-142)? Hsin-Chin's dissertation offers so much for her readers to ponder on what we think of home. Those that are left behind or packed in our luggage when we move; those that are carefully preserved or discarded in no time when we wonder who we are or whom we have become; those information about ourselves that can be scribbled down in seconds when we fill in a landing card during a flight and other questions about ourselves that bring us deep down to our memory lanes where answers are blurred. Fragmented memories about our past constitute a remote home whilst we live in the contemporary one. Obscured by the remoteness of time or geography, this far away home may as well be the homeland where we are nurtured by the culture that we cannot opt out until we are able to make our own decisions of accepting or rejecting. In her dissertation, Hsin-Chin invites us to consider all possibilities of how migrants make and remember their home – specifically by women who are writers, filmmakers, as well as their protagonists, whose homemaking becomes an ongoing dialogue, and in some cases, a lifelong pursuit, between the self and the socio-historical surrounding. Whilst on the move, their gender roles of wives, mothers and daughters-in-law intersect with their class and ethnicity (pp. 3-4). Their homemaking, or the dialogue between the self and the social being (p.3), is a result of this intersectionality situated in their specific locales where they voluntarily or involuntarily adopt as home. These many shades of home are painted by Hsin-Chin's selection of some migrant women who cross great distance of time, geography, and culture in their journey of searching or building their home. Projected by novels, autobiography, essays, documentaries and films, these migrant women sailed through the vast Pacific Ocean from China to North America at the turn of 19 th and 20 th centuries, landed in the US from China and Taiwan in the second half

This study presents the ways in which foreign mothers in South Korea (henceforth Korea) who belong to a new type of intercultural/interethnic damunhwa (multicultural) family, which consists of a Korean man married to a foreign woman, articulate a neoliberal ideology about their own language(s) . Although the Korean government has enthusiastically designed a multicultural and multilingual family language policy (FLP) for the integration of damunhwa families, there has been a lack of support for family multilingualism (Park 2019; Kim and Kim 2015) . Instead, the language of damunhwa mothers is selectively promoted based on what is viewed as profitable and valuable for advancing Korean interests (Sohn 2018; Sohn and Kang 2021) , which is as part of a top-down mandate facilitated by the government. Contrary to what is promoted by the Korean government, recent work on FLP (King, Fogle, and Logan-Terry 2008; Curdt-Christiansen and Lanza 2018; Higgins 2019,...

Textbooks are sociocultural materials, reflecting political decisions, educational beliefs and priorities, cultural realities and language policies. As part of a larger ethnographic study which investigated the multilingual socialization of foreign wives in South Korea, I present the nature and extent of the gender-making process through an analysis of Korean textbooks for recently arrived female marriage migrants, which provides an understanding of the extent to which gender and race are ingrained in shaping linguistic nationalism in globalized times. I first introduce a four-stage life cycle designed by the South Korean government and situate Korean textbook series called Korean Language Learning With International Marriage Migrant Women as an intervention used early in the settlement period for foreign mothers. Then, I analyze the textual and multimodal representation of family identities taken from six textbook series, focusing on lessons, dialogues, and characters that are presented. The results of the study demonstrate how the state presents its attempts to transform foreign wives into a new type of 'wise mother good wife' in the globalized, multilingual world. I demonstrate the ways in which state-driven gender identity production is not simply (re)producing the gender divide but also aligned with nation-making processes that are facing challenges in these globalized times.

Spouses constitute the largest category of migrant settlement in the UK. In Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, concern is increasingly expressed over the implications of marriage-related migration for integration. In some ethnic minority groups, significant numbers of children and grandchildren of former immigrants continue to marry partners from their ancestral homelands. Such marriages are presented as particularly problematic: a 'first generation' of spouses in every generation may inhibit processes of individual and group integration, impeding socio-economic participation and cultural change. New immigration restrictions likely to impact particularly on such groups have thus been justified on the grounds of promoting integration. The evidence base to underpin this concern is, however, surprisingly limited, and characterised by differing and often partial understandings of the contested and politicised concept of integration. This project combined analysis of relevant quant...

Mapping representations of post-1980s immigration from the former Soviet Union to the United States in interviews, reality TV shows, fiction, and memoirs, Claudia Sadowski-Smith shows how this nationally and ethnically diverse group is associated with idealized accounts of the assimilation and upward mobility of early twentieth-century arrivals from Europe. As it traces the contributions of historical Eastern European migration to the emergence of a white racial identity that continues to provide privileges to many post-Soviet migrants, the book places the post-USSR diaspora into larger discussions about the racialization of contemporary US immigrants under neoliberal conditions.

The New Immigrant Whiteness argues that legal status on arrival––as participants in refugee, marriage, labor, and adoptive migration–– impacts post-Soviet immigrants’ encounters with growing socioeconomic inequalities and tightened immigration restrictions, as well as their attempts to construct transnational identities. The book examines how their perceived whiteness exposes post-Soviet family migrants to heightened expectations of assimilation, explores undocumented migration from the former Soviet Union, analyzes post-USSR immigrants’ attitudes toward anti-immigration laws that target Latina/os, and considers similarities between post-Soviet and Asian immigrants in their association with notions of upward immigrant mobility. A compelling and timely volume, The New Immigrant Whiteness offers a fresh perspective on race and immigration in the United States today.

This book provides the first sustained empirical evidence on the relationships between marriage migration and processes of integration, focusing on two of the largest British ethnic minority groups involved in these kinds of transnational marriages – Pakistani Muslims and Indian Sikhs. In Britain, and across Europe, concern has been increasingly expressed over the implications of marriage-related migration for integration. Children and grandchildren of former immigrants marrying partners from their ancestral ‘homelands’ is often presented as problematic in forming a 'first generation in every generation,’ and inhibiting processes of individual and group integration, impeding socio-economic participation and cultural change. As a result, immigration restrictions have been justified on the grounds of promoting integration, despite limited evidence. Marriage Migration and Integration provides much needed new grounding for both academic and policy debates. This book draws on both quantitative and qualitative data to compare transnational ‘homeland’ marriages with intra-ethnic marriages within the UK. Using a distinctive holistic model of integration, the authors examine processes in multiple interacting domains, such as employment, education, social networks, extended family living, gender relations and belonging. It will be of use to students and scholars across sociology, social anthropology, and social policy with a focus on migration, integration, family studies, gender, and ethnic studies, as well as policy-makers and service providers in the UK and across Europe.

In the context of unprecedented globalization and migration flows, South Korea, known for promoting the modern nation-state’s ‘one-nation, one-language’ ideology, has undergone recalibration of its national identity and language ideologies. Since the mid-2000s, the South Korean government has developed a dual contradictory bilingual framework—assimilative Korean as a Second Language and celebratory multilingual development—particularly for damunhwa (multicultural) families consisting of international marriages between Korean men and foreign women and their children. Despite the government’s enthusiastic development of language policy, little is known of the grounds on which this bilingual initiative was established and how it is practiced in families. Adopting an approach that Bronson and Watson-Gegeo (2008) have called “language socialization as topic,” this qualitative study employed a document analysis and interviews to investigate the representational practices of foreign mothers across their lifespan in South Korea. I first address how the national-level language policy guides the regulation of foreign mothers’ four linear life trajectories: marriage, migration, childbirth and education, and home economics. Findings from the policy analysis represent the government’s (1) emphasis on damunhwa mothers’ exclusive use of Korean, (2) selective recommendation of heritage/foreign language for nationalistic purposes, and (3) discouragement of heritage language use in damunhwa families. They also demonstrate the government’s lack of concern with the roles of Korean fathers in family language socialization. The four damunhwa mothers in this study—from Japan, China, Vietnam, and Kyrgyzstan—presented their survival stories on learning to become dedicated mothers who are expected to use Korean with their children. Their narratives also demonstrate how the linguistic hierarchy is exacerbated and how they are demoralized in their bilingual workplaces. The mothers’ stated promotion of heritage languages often serves instrumental purposes rather than fostering bilingual and bicultural identities. These findings explain how damunhwa mothers have become the heart of linguistic nationalism in globalized times for South Korea, where the government has failed to recognize the fundamental importance of the situated nature of multilingual socialization of families. Through illuminating what has been neglected by policy makers, this dissertation calls for more equitable and gender-sensitive approaches to bilingual education in transnational and translingual times.

Drawing from the national and regional governments’ bilingual education policy documents for the languages of ethno-linguistic minorities, we investigated the intersections between bilingual education in the languages of ethno-linguistic minorities and language ideologies embedded in the selected policy documents. Applying a textual analysis of the data (Fairclough, 1995, 2003; Wodak & Meyer, 2009), we (a) explored the ways neoliberal language ideologies discursively (re)reproduced in the Korean national government’s bilingual education policy for teaching the languages of ethno-linguistic minority students and their families in the school, and (b) examined how a regional government interpreted the national ideological agenda. In doing so, we (c) analyzed the ways that the national and regional governments applied the language-as-resource framework to legitimize bilingual competency and bilingualism as a social norm in South Korea as well as a global norm in the globalized new economy where South Korea is situated.

Spouses constitute the largest category of migrant settlement in the UK. In Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, concern is increasingly expressed over the implications of marriage-related migration for integration. In some ethnic minority groups, significant numbers of children and grandchildren of former immigrants continue to marry partners from their ancestral homelands. Such marriages are presented as particularly problematic: a 'first generation' of spouses in every generation may inhibit processes of individual and group integration, impeding socio-economic participation and cultural change. New immigration restrictions likely to impact particularly on such groups have thus been justified on the grounds of promoting integration. The evidence base to underpin this concern is, however, surprisingly limited, and characterised by differing and often partial understandings of the contested and politicised concept of integration. This project combined analysis of relevant quant...