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ABSTRACT
Contemporary immigration from Pakistan to the UK often takes the form of marriage migration, as substantial numbers of British men and women of Pakistani ethnicity marry partners from Pakistan. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative evidence, this paper explores experiences of Pakistani men migrating to the UK through marriage, revealing a complex of social and economic pressures in the early months and years post-migration, here referred to as the ‘Mangetar Trap’. Migration can have contradictory implications for masculinity – presenting both opportunities and challenges for gendered aspirations. The existing research literature reveals instances of migrant men using the former to compensate for the latter. For some recently arrived Pakistani migrant husbands in Britain, however, particular combinations of socio-economic position, time poverty, social marginalisation and family relationships can constrain their available options. In the longer term, such men may find routes to improving their situations, but exploration of these early constraints is valuable in cautioning against an over-emphasis on agency in research on migrant masculinity.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Katharine Charsley is Reader in Sociology at the School for Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol. Her main areas of interest are gender, the family and migration, and particularly in transnational marriage. Her edited collection Transnational Marriage (2012), and ethnographic monograph Transnational Pakistani Connections: Marrying ‘Back Home’ (2013) are published by Routledge. She was Principal Investigator on the ESRC research project ‘Marriage Migration and Integration’.
Evelyn Ersanilli is Assistant Professor in Sociology at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. She conducts international comparative studies on the integration of immigrants and their descendants in Europe. Her focus mainly lies on identity, citizenship and migrant family life. She also conducts research on the development of migration policies.
Notes
1 For elite men, transnational mobility may reinforce rather than undermine relations of power.
2 Full project report available to download at: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/ethnicity/projects/mmi/
3 Interviews were carried out primarily in English by a researcher with familiarity with relevant South Asian languages, with additional translation where necessary. Most interviews were recorded and transcribed, but where this was not possible, detailed notes were written up by the interviewer. Thematic analysis of the interview and focus group material was carried out using NVivo.
4 Both because of the additional sources of data available on this group, and reflecting recruitment difficulties for Sikh migrant husbands.
5 Participants aged 18–42, the majority between 24 and 28. Most had secondary school qualifications or higher, and 6 were university graduates. Only 2 had less than secondary education.
6 Primarily in English but with some translation by QED staff.
7 The use of quotations in the article reflects the mixed composition of the data: where note taking (rather than recording and transcription) was employed, for example in the QED project, quotations have only been provided where the researcher was able to record exact phrasing while note taking, and these are generally short.
8 And only since 2011 on language proficiency.
9 Other datasets provide insufficient samples for relevant groups: British Household Panel Survey <50 couples of each group, Understanding Society: approx. 100 Indian Sikh and 300 Pakistani Muslim couples.
10 One earlier migrant stressed that such contacts outside the wife's family turned out to be particularly important in creating a wider range of opportunities and support.
11 Many of the recently arrived men also described themselves as having been spoilt by their own parents, not always expected to work (levels of employment were also low among the Pakistani survey participants, and one of the older focus group men spoke of a life of luxury in Pakistan provided by his elder brother). This situation in which parents cosset their own child, but have more instrumental expectation the role of a child's spouse, strongly parallels that of the contrasting treatment of Indian daughters and daughters-in-law (Kaur & Palriwala, Citation2014).
12 A recent partial reversal in funding cuts has been presented as aimed at Muslim women.
13 cf. Charsley and Liversage (Citation2015) on a divorced migrant Turkish husband in Denmark facilitating secret remittances by his still-married friends.
14 Although LFS data shows that many wives may not work.
15 Also see Safi (Citation2010) for quantitative evidence from a European survey suggesting that life satisfaction of migrants does not significantly increase over time.
16 In Charsley's ethnographic research, she has encountered a small number of couples who have migrated to live in Pakistan either temporarily or longer term, with mixed success, but this option was often unappealing to wives born and raised in Britain.
17 In contrast, all but one of the older focus group said that their migration had been worth it in the long run, although as noted above, they may not be typical of their cohort in class/educational profile.