Reproduction across transnational space



Family Reunification Ideals and the Practice of Transnational Reproductive Life among Africans in Europe

Caroline H. Bledsoe

Department of Anthropology

Northwestern University, IL, USA

Email: cbledsoe@northwestern.edu

and

Papa Sow

Researcher in Social Sciences

CRER-Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, University of Warwick (U.K.).

Email: investigation4@yahoo.fr

Homepage:    

Mobile: +34 639 44 86 55

In press, in Reproduction, Globalization, and the State. Carole H. Browner and Carolyn F. Sargent, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Introduction

In the European Union, as in much of the industrialized world, family life is quietly becoming the battleground of immigration struggles. It is doing so through the logics generated by family reunification, now a key mode of legal entry into Europe. Looking through the lenses of recent anthropological interests in transnationalism and reproduction, this paper examines the spread of global humanitarian conventions that have shaped family reunification, and their consequences for African marital and reproductive life in Europe. We suggest that family reunification doctrine, like any ideological system, can work against people as much as for them. Indeed, despite humanitarian claims to protect the family as the moral core of human relations, the same measures that were designed to bring families together can divide them along precisely the same fault lines they sought to safeguard.

To address the dynamics surrounding transnational marriage and parent-child relations, we join theoretical strands of social agency to the idea of population. We argue that to the extent that the state seeks overall agenda to include, it is likely to take a tolerant approach to family reunification practices. Under pressures to exclude, however, it may tighten regulatory scrutiny by attempting to enforce each piece of logic – age, relationship, quantity -- that underlies each reunification position, resulting in separate pathways for family members. For citizens of poor countries, social relationships and even age itself can become commoditized objects that people try to use to accommodate a narrowing set of entry demands structured by state policies by selecting individuals for migration whose attributes will most likely pass family reunification muster. The outcomes, representing varying mixes of opportunity and hardship, produce versions of family life that seem to range from minor variations on business as usual to harsh distortions of social practice.

To illustrate these points, we draw on a 2004-2007 collaborative ethnographic/demographic project entitled “Transnational Vital Events,” which involved three African groups in Europe: Moroccan youth in Spain, Cameroonian men and women in Germany, and Gambian families in Spain. In Germany, the post-war “gastarbeiter,” or “guestworker” period (from the 1950’s to the 1970’s), in which the nation actively sought outside labor, has long since ended. The same is true for the 1990s, when post-reunification Germany granted many asylum claims, most from the former Soviet Union. The country has tightened its labor market to such an extent that the few Africans who are offered entry are those seeking advanced training or jobs in highly technical fields.

Spain’s immigration situation is entirely different. Spain has now overtaken France as the leading European host country, proportionate to its national population, for immigrant arrivals.[i] However, geography and economy give rise to sharp dilemmas (Domingo and Houle 2005). Situated at the edge of the EU, with vast tracts of borderland exposed to the external world and an economy heavily reliant on agriculture and construction, this “interface” country is caught between pressure from its European neighbors to tighten its borders and the risk of excluding much-needed immigrant labor.

Confronting the challenges faced by these very disparate groups in countries with such different immigration profiles brings into sharp relief some otherwise obscure cultural logics underlying family reunification. After describing the background of reunification policies, we examine social practices surrounding marriage and reproduction that shape African immigrant life in Europe.

Background

As a topic in the age of transnationalism,[ii] the conduct of life across more than one national context, reproduction has drawn surprisingly little explicit attention in anthropology or sociology.[iii] In demography, the topic has taken the form of debates over whether immigrants’ youthful age pyramids might solve the economic and care crises posed by a rapidly aging Europe (United Nations, 2000; Coleman and Rowthorn 2004). Fertility levels across much of the world are falling rapidly, however, and most immigrants quickly adopt the levels of their host countries (Kulu 2005). For immigrants themselves, however, especially those from poor countries, concerns about reproductive life are very different. Birth remains an event of potentially mortal consequence not only in developing countries; where women and children in states that do not recognize them as legal residents can drop below the horizon of national health care.[iv] More generally, a transnational existence means that a state to which individuals do not belong can set the terms by which their reproductive lives must transpire. Shifts in law and policy undermine the predictability for conducting a work or reproductive life that “natives” take for granted (Bledsoe 2004b). While American tourists can enter Europe with a passport and the Schengen Agreement allows EU citizens to travel internally without visas or passport control, citizens of “high migration potential” countries are increasingly required to obtain expensive visas and undergo intensive scrutiny.[v] Additionally, fears of being denied re-entry make immigrants reluctant to travel internationally.

The legal architecture of family reunification

The twentieth century has seen an explosion of international law on human rights,[vi] including family reunification, the joining of previously separated, or newly acquired, ties to people whom society defines as a family. The most basic tenet of the human rights corpus is that all people, irrespective of citizenship, ethnicity, religion, or gender, have certain rights simply because they are human beings. Following World War I, calls for such measures were among the principal inspirations for the League of Nations. In the late 1940’s, following World War II, the United Nations Charter advocated “respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion” (Art. 1, para. 3). The UN’s Economic and Social Council charged its new Commission on Human Rights to draft an “International Bill of Human Rights,”[vii] urging governments “to provide for all human beings a life consonant with freedom and dignity and conducive to physical, mental, social and spiritual welfare.” Prominent among its expressed ideals was the right, irrespective of national boundaries, to a shared family life.[viii]

Family reunification doctrine, based on the humanitarian right to marry and found [*NB: the wording follow international conventions] a family, declares that certain relatives of a legal migrant, whether they became kin before or after the migrants’ move, should be allowed to join him or her in the new country of residence. Insisting on the family as the core unit of society, this doctrine gives the family precedence even over the nation state, which is charged to maintain the family’s integrity. If any element in humanitarian doctrine trumps the individual’s right to family life, however, it is the “best interests of the child,” spelled out most clearly in the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.[ix] The CRC, now adopted by all countries except Somalia and the United States, bestows on children, regardless of their nationality or whereabouts, the right to the care and company of a family: particularly of both parents, if possible, whether defined biologically or by formal adoption. Children thus have not just special rights, but special rights to live with their parents, and a CRC signatory state in which an unaccompanied child appears is obligated to facilitate this reunification. If the family cannot be found or is deemed unsuitable, the state is itself bound to become the guardian in order to constitute the parent to which the CRC declares the child is entitled.

Family reunification in practice

Despite the best of intentions, human rights measures spark debate. Disputes center on tensions between individual vs. collective rights; prioritizing universal standards over local practices; the financial hardship that upholding the conventions may impose on countries; and the imposition of what some argue is a Western patriarchal ideology on all countries.[x] Further, because each signatory state is expected to implement and enforce the principles through its own governance structures and civil codes, there is enormous variation in interpretation and enforcement standards among states (Bhabha 1998). Spain, for example, enacts international human rights and family reunification measures through its seventeen Autonomous Communities, whose administrative structures themselves differ in how they interpret and implement the rules. Further, there is considerable slippage between signature and practice. The various human rights bills and instruments themselves carry confusing legal messages. Covenants, statutes, protocols, and conventions are considered binding for their signatory states; declarations, principles, and guidelines are not , though they intended to provide implementation and moral guidance.[xi] And states may adhere selectively, or attach impossible conditions, to the principles they have pledged to uphold. Or they may simply ignore them.

For citizens of poor countries, bringing anyone at all to a distant nation [*NB: sometimes it is not new to them] is a daunting proposition. The costs alone are enormous, not just for transportation but for middlemen, translators, and lawyers, and there is every risk of encountering belligerent immigration officials and about being deported. One of the key challenges in bringing family members to Europe is the state’s powers to define precisely what a family is and who belongs to it. European family reunification laws extend to only a narrow range of relationships that people from many countries would call “family.” Most countries mark the boundary between childhood and adulthood chronologically, stipulating a minimum age of 18 for a spouse and less than 18 for a child.[xii] Further restrictions govern number of partners.[xiii] European countries are monogamous by law, and their family reunification policies follow suit: only one spouse at a time can have a social security card, a health card, and a legal residence permit. Additionally, EU pressures to exclude are shrinking qualifications for family reunification to a core of highly circumscribed ties with tight age windows and few allowable variations in sexual preference and marital status. Conjugal unions are increasingly policed to rule out what host countries see as immigration convenience (De Hart 2006).

Further struggles center on who, exactly, is a child and who is a parent. Most European countries follow the Convention on the Rights of the Child, defining childhood in temporal and dependency terms: an unmarried dependent below 18. For immigrants, however, states increasingly shrink the temporal boundaries of childhood. Citing difficulties in incorporating older children, the EU Court of Justice recently reaffirmed states’ rights to conduct mandatory “integration tests” for children 12 and over.[xiv] States also reduce childhood to a biological condition, employing sophisticated medical technologies to exclude those who do not qualify. According to Empez (personal communication), the first order of business for Spanish authorities who encounter newly arrived unaccompanied Moroccan youth is to take them to a hospital, less to ensure their welfare than to identify, through bone density scans, those who can be sent back immediately because they do not qualify biologically as “children.” The state may also challenge claims to parenthood. It may demand DNA tests for parents and children;[xv] and deny reunification for foster children who are not legally adopted, children suspected to be victims of trafficking, and children whose parents cannot meet state standards of stable employment or adequate income and accommodation.

Conceptualizing family reunification practice: selecting commoditized attributes

These descriptions paint a bleak picture of normative and state oppression. As in any lived experiential context, however, one finds multiple arenas of negotiation and tacit agreement to look the other way. To grasp a more rounded view of the dynamics surrounding humanitarian doctrine and the family reunification dynamics it generates, we draw on Strathern’s (1988) notion of the “partible self,” which sees personal identity as a collection of single attributes; gender, height, residence locale, family name, skin color – anything of social significance can be isolated out. These attributes are implicitly relational: defined with respect to other people. The notion of the partible self has particular utility when joined to a second notion: commodification, in which an entity is dissociated from its original context, designated as a universally exchangeable good, and put on the market for sale to the highest bidder (Appadurai 1986). Possessing a personal attribute with external commodity value may produce risk. A woman whose sexual attributes are separated from the entirety of her emotions and social ties, for example, can be rendered vulnerable to exploitation in the commercial sex trade: a domain of exchange over which she has little control (Gates 1996; Sharp 2000). Commodification of one’s partible attributes can also, however, bring benefit to individuals who possess attributes that qualify them, for special loans or training.

The notion of the self as a set of discrete, commodified facets finds ready application in immigration and family reunification practice. Immigration measures implicitly partition the self -- whether according to gender, job skills, or a nationality that is subject to political persecution elsewhere -- into personal characteristics that can be converted to transactable immigration value. For the case of family reunification, several points must be noted about the characteristics that would qualify an individual for inclusion. First, is their “relativity”: individuals’ characteristics have conversion value only relative to another person. Second is their demand for “otherness”: they must be converted across a national boundary, in a country to which one does not belong. Third, characteristics of potential family reunification value are conceived in quantitative terms. While the position of “child” can be plural, having multiple simultaneous holders, the “spouse” position is limited to a single holder. Though multiple individuals can circulate through such a position over time, it is effectively a “slot” that just one person at a time can occupy. Finally, the legal bases underlying each family reunification position differ: each individual, because he or she occupies a different status with respect to a migrant, implicitly orients to a distinct pathway of mobility. When pressures to exclude intensify, it should not be surprising that the categories laid out so carefully by human rights idealists themselves become the fault lines along which families splits may occur.

The idea of a self-composed of state-defined commoditized attributes is a useful way to frame family reunification for social science analysis. The problem is that few states achieve anything close to pure domination or even “governmentality” (Foucault 1979), which exacts compliance less by force than by enrolling individuals into disciplines of the self. Missing from such visions is a sense of the interplay between structure and individual action, a concern as valid to the analysis of immigration as to any other social phenomena. Combining the idea of “selection” from statistics (Heckman and Smith 1995) and agency perspectives from the social sciences, the notion of “acts of selection” (Bledsoe 2004a) acknowledges that individuals inevitably act with reference to structure. However, they try to shape the future less by responding post-hoc to the structural constraints of the groups in which they find themselves, than prospectively, emphasizing those of their partible or commoditized attributes that qualify them for membership in groups offering the most desired pathways of opportunity.[xvi] This they may do through language or physical movement, and with respect to groups that are fleeting or longstanding. Applied to family reunification, this means that individuals may try to select themselves – or, of course, others -- into family relationships that offer immigration advantage. One notable example is the case of U.S. citizens who seek lower taxes abroad; such individuals may select themselves into foreign populations by drawing on attributes that would qualify them for citizenship elsewhere.[xvii] At the same time, with U.S. citizenship at such a global premium and other means of entering closing rapidly, being the parent of a U.S. citizen has become a heavily commoditized attribute for women from geographically proximate Mexico. Not only do they seek benefits of education and work for their children; they look toward the time when, 18 years hence, such a child may apply to reunify his/her family. Each year, therefore, many pregnant Mexican women try to select their children into the population of U.S. citizens by giving birth on U.S. soil, a guarantee of citizenship for their child under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, whether by undertaking dangerous desert or river crossings or by scheduling a caesarean section during a three-day visa stay.[xviii] Whereas individuals who see such pressures as problematic, may conclude that the advantages outweigh the risks.

Generating forms of transnational African family life in Europe

The mixes of selection, labeling, and maneuvering sketched above hint at the convoluted world of immigration struggles that increasingly turn on the international language of family reunification. Here we examine patterns that have emerged among three African groups who try to gain security in Europe. What they suggest is that as state immigration restrictions press up to, or even spill over, the edges delineated by human rights rules, social formations assemble around the inner perimeters of the allowable family reunification categories, producing both distortion and opportunity.

The best interests of the child: unaccompanied Moroccan minors

Empez’ work on Moroccan boys[xix] who manage to cross the Straits of Gibraltar from Tangier in speedboats or under trucks that board ferry boats (Empez personal communication; Empez and Galea Montero 2005) reveals a complex story. According to Empez, all actors, from the Spanish state to Moroccan boys and their parents, have come to draw on the international human rights language of childhood vulnerability and family reunification in their struggles over whether boys who manage to arrive in Spain must return to Morocco. Under Spanish law, the state can send back individuals under 16, on the grounds that it is acting in the “best interests” of children too young to have made a key life decision like migration. Individuals over 18, on the other hand, are labeled adults and those who arrive without papers can be deported. Those children who fall into the residual category, those from 16 to 17, the Spanish Childhood Protection System is supposed to take in those who are “unaccompanied” as its wards, giving legal residence at 18 to those who have been in its care for nine months, during which they are to have undergone proper socialization that would prepare them to enter Spanish society. As legitimate means for adults to enter Europe disappear, however, bizarre arenas of boundary construal emerge. Many impoverished Moroccan youth, feeling the weight of family responsibility, try explicitly to come to Spain as unaccompanied minors, and they do so at exactly age 16 to fit into the narrow temporal window of legal opportunity. Further, Spanish officials use “best interests of the child” language to reunite the boys with their families back in Morocco, even though the boys may be spurned by their families as failures, or met at the port by police who beat them, load them onto buses, and deposit them in the desert far to the south. Moroccan parents, however, use the same language, but with the opposite intent. When Spanish authorities first contact them to report their sons have turned up, parents, through the advice of NGOs and lawyers, may cite “best interests of the child” as the reason the family should not be reunited. Describing themselves as incompetent, abusive, and too poor to care for children properly, parents hope to oblige Spain to take on the role of legal guardian to their sons.[xx]

The law of monogamy: Cameroonians in Germany and Gambians in Spain

If the case of Moroccan boys in Spain highlights family reunification ironies surrounding definitions of age and parental competence, the logic of spousal singularity produces dilemma as well as opportunity for many Africans in Europe. The cases of Cameroonians in Germany and of Gambians in Spain will illustrate.

Germany’s determination to minimize its modes of entry appear to have led Cameroonian immigrants now orient their reproductive and marital and reproductive lives in Germany more toward Germans than toward their compatriots. Faced with sharp exclusionary pressures in the German labor market, Cameroonians who try to come to Germany find that almost the only way they can stay and earn money to send home is to merge their family life directly with that the host country: to marry or reproduce a German citizen.[xxi] The divergent pathways structured for Cameroonian men and women in Germany are striking illustrations of the divisive tradeoffs. Cameroonian women find the best way to gain residence is by bearing a child by a German man who will acknowledge biological parentage; Germany requires no long term paternal obligations of men who father single women’s children. Accordingly, Fleischer (ms.) finds, using German Federal Statistical Office figures, that in 2004, although Cameroonian men in Germany outnumbered Cameroonian women by about two to one, far more live births involving a Cameroonian parent were to Cameroonian women than to men (240 vs. 92). Among the children born to married couples, just 49 (23%) were born to parents who were both Cameroonian, while 165 were born to a Cameroonian and German conjugal pair: mostly to Cameroonian women and German husbands.

For most Cameroonian men, the pathway to legal residence is entirely different. Most German women who are willing to strike up relationships with them are substantially older than they are, and are unable or unwilling to have a child. A Cameroonian man’s best chance for staying thus lies in contracting a marriage to a German woman and sustaining it for three years, after which he may qualify for residence.[xxii] So strong are the pressures on Cameroonian men to marry a German woman, according to Fleischer, that there were 163 binational marriages in 2004 between a Cameroonian and a German in Germany (mostly Cameroonian men and German women), but just six marriages between Cameroonian men and women. Further complicating things, many Cameroonian men in these unions desire children. Facing limited chances to bear a child and the logic of singularity on which European marriage rests, some Cameroonian men quietly maintain a marriage with a woman back in Africa by whom they have borne children, or ask their families to find a wife they can visit periodically and eventually join permanently.[xxiii]

Despite the advantages that beckon to many Cameroonians in coming to Germany, German fathers of Cameroonian women’s children are often a fleeting presence and that many marriages between Cameroonian men and German women are troubled.[xxiv] Even if a binational couple marries out of genuine affection, the surveillance and harassment they experience from authorities suspecting marriages of convenience can quickly erode a relationship. In a reversal of the usual unidirectional assumptions about development and the West, a Cameroonian man who sees marriage to a German woman as a temporary necessity may thus come to see his African marriage as his “real” union, and his German marriage as the temporary distortion.

Taking the logic of spousal singularity in a different direction, the case of Gambians in Spain[xxv] lays bare the potential of family reunification to separate spouses from one another and children from their parents. The number of registered Gambians in Spain is small: just 17,393, according to the 2007 Spanish Municipal Register (Padrón Continuo, Instituto Nacional de Estadística, ine.es).[xxvi] Unlike most immigrant groups in Spain, many Gambians, first arriving in the late 1960’s on a labor contract in the growing Spanish economy, continue to maintain close ties to rural areas of a high fertility polygynous homeland. In 2005, they had the highest total fertility rate for any group in Spain: 3.57 children per woman, compared to 1.4 children for all of Spain.

For a group like this, the conflicting logics of quantity that generate family reunification positions appear in stark relief, and in two ways. First, and most generally, state exclusion pressures have the effect of increasing the value of those reunification positions that people do manage to create, leading families to try to keep these positions filled independently of the identity of the original occupant. Second, and more specifically, is the binary principle of multiplicity vs. singularity that underlies positions: a married pair can bring all children it shares as a couple, but an adult can have one legal spouse at a time.

For women there is a tendency to rotate multiple holders through the singular spouse position. With monogamy as the law of the land, a woman whose husband acquires another wife must leave, living apart from him or returning to Africa, or she must go under cover in the official record. Some men, however, send one wife home, say, to nurse a small child, rotating her back when the second, herself bearing a new child, heads back to The Gambia, a pattern with clear parallels to birth interval practices in rural Africa. Some unions thus have a serial character, with co-wives alternating two or three year periods in Spain. For the woman who returns to The Gambia, of course, the husband may not support her as promised, or he may not bring her back at all. For the other woman, geographical separation may work to her advantage, especially if the co-wife relationship has been rivalrous. But where a dynamic of substitution emerges for wives, children, with their growing educational and health institutional roots in Spain, follow a cumulative dynamic. Irrespective of where their mothers are, children born in or brought to Spain usually remain. Whether a wife is sent away at her wishes or despite her resistance, and whether she remains in the household below the official horizon or leaves temporarily or permanently, Spain’s insistence on compliance with the discrepant premises underlying increasingly valued family reunification positions increases the likelihood of separating Gambian children from their mothers. If older women risk exclusion and isolation, however, and children are set onto independent trajectories from their parents, such things happen not because of “traditional” norms such as those surrounding polygyny. Rather, the “quantity” element that separates the legal positions of spouses and children in Europe transforms routine patterns of circulation in the homeland into more sharply bifurcated pathways in Spain.[xxvii]

Conclusion

The press toward exclusion in Europe is reducing family reunification to one of the few remaining windows of transnational mobility for people from poor regions. As it does so, we have argued, it creates incentives to offer up for speculation those relationships or pieces of a partible self with the greatest transactable human rights value in a foreign country. With an increasing migration premium on characteristics with family reunification value, attempts to enforce the rigid letter of the law underlying the separate legal pathways of these positions drive family members apart. Not only are Africans caught between the principles encoded in family reunification laws; families themselves, focusing on the same social boundaries that states do, must select for migration members whose attributes will best qualify for entry.

Sub-Saharan Africa itself, to be sure, has longstanding, commonplace practices of polygyny and fosterage that rotate children and wives through households over time. Though the new geographies increase the potentials for both risk and advantage in these practices, our interest has lain in two areas. One is the claim that human rights doctrine makes for itself, to bring family members together in the new context, and to protect children from early marriage and support their rights to the company of their parents. The other is the paradoxical result that claims based on these ideologies can generate.

As one of the great humanitarian legacies of the twentieth century, human rights initiatives were hardly intended to become weapons. Nor did EU countries set out to produce, through their increasingly stringent family reunification policies, patterns among immigrants that seem more “traditional” than those of today in Africa: in the case of Gambians, populations with early marriage, high fertility, rotating marital partners, and large proportions of older mothers with no husbands. But no principles stand on their own as self-contained, autonomous forces. Even measures created with the most benevolent of intents can become weapons of restriction. The very forms of family integrity that human rights doctrine aims to safeguard become the lines on which individuals may be excluded or exploited. When family reunification and the special rights conferred on children become the means of last resort to reach a destination, a migration premium will inevitably be placed on people whose attributes can be construed as allowable. Not only are certain people likely to be delegated to make the move on the basis of their age and relationship; age and relationship may be adjusted socially to qualify for entry.

Few would argue that some would-be immigrants are using human rights and family reunification provisions in ways that smack of manipulation. Indeed, they are doing so with social categories and relationships that Western culture claims to hold as most sacred. The lines of response to this charge that we have presented would emphasize that people seeking to ensure the wellbeing of their families must try to fit into whatever categories are available; further, insisting the state’s attempts to enforce compliance with the letter of the law merely intensifies the need to maneuver around it. At the same time, it cannot go unmentioned that people from wealthy countries are allowed to move to Spain with no pretense at all to a family relationship. Further, non-EU citizens applying to join a spouse in many European countries are now held to standards of attachment that few citizens could meet (see also Fleischer, ms.): most especially not to their own highly conservative models of marriage and childhood that their family reunification policies increasingly stipulate.[xxviii] The more that Europe tries to seal out, therefore, the more that outsiders who seek legitimacy within it must appear to conform to the most rarified, archaic – if not mythical – models of the European family past.[xxix]

With so much at stake on the boundaries of family reunification categories, immigration possibilities are reduced to what only the international humanitarian doctrine has preserved and to ever-tighter gender- and age-specific boundaries within it. Not only have the categorical boundaries of family reunification have become an immigration battleground; forces of exclusion will undoubtedly lead to more maneuvering, not less, around children and reproduction, and by myriad national, international, and family players.

Acknowledgements

This project was funded by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany and the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. We are indebted to many individuals for their insights. Among them are Gunnar Andersson, Yussuf Badji, Jalika Bojang, Anna Cabré, Adama Cham, Jennifer Cole, Bully Diawara, Andreu Domingo, Nuria Empez, Annett Fleischer, Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, René Houle, Adriana Kaplan Marcusán, Boury Marianne Rosalie Mendy, Vicens Galea Montero, Dan Rodríguez García, Mohamad Saybo Silla, Alassane Silla, and Montse Solsona. Special thanks to Rafaél Bellon-Gómez and Alaina Dyne for research help.

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[i] .

[ii] Glick-Schiller et al. (1995), Ong (2002), Vertovec (2001), and Levitt & Glick Schiller (2004).

[iii] See, however, Ginsburg and Rapp (1995), Hondagneu-Sotelo (2002), Hochschild (2000), Cole and Durham et al. (2006).

[iv]

[v] See .

[vi] E.g., the 1990 International Convention on the Protection of Rights of Migrant Workers , though this measure has been accepted largely by “sending” nations, though not the most preferred countries of migrant destination.

[vii] For a historical summary, see .

[viii] See and (Jastram, 2003). The EU “Proposal for a Council Directive on the Right to Family Reunification” declares family reunification necessary to the successful integration of lawfully residing third-country nationals, and, by enabling them to lead a “normal family life,” a way to stabilize and deepen the roots of immigrants (COM/99/0638 final - CNS 99/0258, at )

[ix]

[x] E.g., Wallerstein (1995), Scott (1996), and Mutua (2002). See Merry (2005) and Ticktin (2006) for critical anthropological perspectives on human rights and humanitarianism.

[xi] . See also Watson (1999).

[xii] Efforts to protect girls from early marriage are part of the intent in banning the reunification of wives younger than 18. See .

[xiii] Though France used to allow multiple spouses to immigrants, Pasqua laws banned this possibility (; Sargent and Cordell, 2003).

[xiv]

[xv] ; Hartman (2006).

[xvi] See Johnson-Hanks (2007) for an exceptional analysis of intentionality in demographic action.

[xvii]

[xviii] “A different kind of border cross.” Chicago Tribune, April 30, 2003.

[xix] Moroccan numbers in the 2007 Municipal Register were still the largest of any immigrant group in Spain: 563,012. This section describes the situation largely before 2006, when Spain toughened entry requirements for children.

[xx] Empez’ work shows also that northern Moroccan families impoverished by EU policies of exclusion increasingly try to produce children for export to Europe.

[xxi] For a general description of Germany’s immigration policies, see .

[xxii] After two years, a foreign spouse of a German citizen can apply for independent residence; after three years he/she can receive temporary residence and apply for permanent residency. However, authorities continue to exert surveillance on these marriages, and may even investigate cases of divorce after three years.

[xxiii] Striking parallels are found in serial monogamy in Africa, in which an influential man may marry several women over time or a young man may try out several unions before defining one as a marriage (see Comaroff and Roberts, 1977). In this case, many German wives, often coming from a previous union, are technically practicing serial monogamy. And a Cameroonian man seeking to resume a reproductive life back home is effectively circulating in space as well as time through legally monogamous marriages.

[xxiv] Luraschi (2007) reports that in Italy, the structure of immigration policies provides much wider grounds for Cameroonians to marry and partner with each other.

[xxv] See also Kaplan Marcusán (1998); Rodríguez (2001); Sow (2004); Bledsoe, Houle, and Sow (2006); and Bledsoe (2006).

[xxvi] For some calculations, we use 2005 rather than 2007 because the register began to drop people without permanent legal residence from the records if they had not re-registered within the last two years, a move that would strongly affect Africans in Spain.

[xxvii] See Azoulay and Quiminal (2002) and Sargent and Cordell (2003) on Malian women who come to Paris for marriage.

[xxviii] Like the rest of Europe, Spain has seen the advent of informal unions and a rising age at first marriage for women in recent decades: 27.8 in 2003 ().

[xxix] For parallel observations, see Raissiguier (2003). For a biological model that parallels such reductionisms, see:

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