Court decisions over marriage migration in Finland: a problem with transnational family ties

Abstract

Within the growing amount of scholarship on transnational families and family reunification policies in Europe, studies that consider both transnational family constellations and the regulation of marriage and family migration rarely intersect. This article considers both migrants' transnational family ties and nation-states' efforts to restrict border-crossing family formation by showing how migrants' transnational families can be used as the grounds for being refused entry by immigration authorities. Through the case study on Finland, we analyse the processes at work when transnational family ties meet the legal norms as interpreted by immigration authorities and courts. Our research leads to three main conclusions. First, our study illustrates how nation-states fail to recognise the existence and importance of multi-sited family ties when regulating marriage migration. Second, we show how marriage migration of certain groups such as the elderly is poorly understood both by immigration authorities and scholars, and thus argue for the importance of an intersectional approach when studying the regulation of marriage migration. Third, our analysis shows how legal analyses on the regulation of marriage migration can and should pay attention to the agency of transnational couples when they try to get their marriage recognised by immigration authorities.

Keywords:

• Transnational Families
• Marriage Migration
• Court Appeals
• Intersectional Approach
• Elderly Migrants

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Keith Banting, Donna Gabaccia, and Johanna Kantola for their invaluable comments on this article. We are also grateful to Pauli Kettunen and the participants of the NordWel-seminar at the University of Helsinki and Suvi Keskinen and the participants of the seminar ‘Multicultural and Postcolonial Intersections’ at the University of Turku for their comments on earlier drafts. Finally, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions to improve the article.

Notes

[1] We chose these two years to capture possible changes in ways immigration authorities dealt with marriage migration cases before and after the passage of the Aliens Act of 2004, which allowed the foreign spouse to apply for a residence permit in Finland (before the application had to be submitted in the origin country). Before the Act was passed, politicians feared that it would greatly increase immigration fraud cases. However, we did not detect any significant changes in the way the court processed marriage migration cases in 2000 and 2005, apart from the fact that applications were no longer turned down if they were submitted in Finland.

[2] EU/EEA citizens are not required to obtain a residence permit for Finland.

[3] The FIS did not distinguish between applications submitted by or on behalf of spouses of Finnish and foreign citizens in their statistics before November 2010. As we focus on marriages between Finnish and non-EU/EEA citizens, we are presenting only statistics starting from November 2010. However, our analysis of applications processed between 2005–2010 shows that the acceptance percentage for the largest groups of foreign spouses has remained relatively stable over the years.

[4] Family members that a resident permit holder can bring to Finland include a spouse, registered (i.e. same-sex) partner, cohabiting partner, guardian of a child under 18 years of age, or child under the age of 18. In the Aliens Act of 2004, residence permit holders were still able to sponsor family members outside the ‘nuclear family’, if they were able to show that the family member was ‘fully dependent’ on the person living in Finland.