Marriage migration in Southeast and East Asia revisited through a migration-development nexus lens

Introduction

Migration entails multi-faceted social transformations at various scales, in both countries of origin and destination as well as regionally and globally, implicating migrants and non-migrants alike. The act of migration turns migrants into objects of change as well as agents of change, individually and collectively. Marriage migration, as a sub-category of broader migration, involves both birth families in origin communities and those newly formed (or joined) in destination countries. The institution of the family is, therefore, particularly impacted in multiple ways.¹ Yet marriage migration is about much more than the institution of the family. This thematic issue explores its link to development, what we call the migration-development nexus.

International migration’s role in, and relationship to, development has been debated by policy-makers and academics since the 1960s. This debate has gone through a number of phases, influenced by changes in the larger development paradigm.² Since the early 2000s, interest in the migration-development nexus has experienced a major revival, evidenced in the myriad activities of numerous international organizations, donor agencies, and international non-governmental organizations. Importantly, the final report by the Global Commission on International Migration (2005) devotes space to migration in the context of development. In addition, both the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UN Women) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) have published reports on international migration from a development angle, as have various international financial institutions including the World Bank, whose interest was first piqued by monetary remittances but has since broadened out.³

The migration-development nexus debate in its current form and magnitude is also linked to the emergence of global migration governance, efforts by states and international organizations to promote and gain a better understanding of the dynamics of migratory flows with the aim of arriving at a common approach to the design of a regulatory framework that can be globally operational.⁴ Overall, the direction of policy-making and thinking about international migration as it has been occurring at the global level is shaped by considerations of its role in advancing development. The ultimate goal from this perspective is a “triple win” solution whereby migration benefits countries of destination, countries of origin, and migrants themselves.

The specific topic of migration for the purpose of entering into marriage, forming a family, and assuming concomitant care responsibilities – in short, marriage migration – has not been central to the migration-development nexus debate. In fact, it has been almost absent. Instead, marriage migration has been subject to scholarly inquiry from a number of other perspectives, ranging from cross-racial/inter-religious dynamics in the context of immigration and settlement migration, to the migration of spouses as part of family unification, with women studied in the role of “trailing wives,” to marriage migration’s link to labor migration, to the feminization of migration in general and the predominance of temporary legal migration in Asia in particular. Feminist scholars who have focused on arranged marriages between individuals from the same country, mail-order brides, or so-called “fake” marriages have highlighted severe power imbalances between individuals joined in matrimony due to gender, class, or ethno-religious inequalities. Research on marriage migration has since moved beyond the mail-order bride discourse and, thus, beyond a simplistic victim-agency dualism.⁵

Scholars writing from a transnational perspective have mostly concerned themselves with transnationally split families, that is, migrants leaving children behind when taking up employment abroad. As they are usually on time-limited contracts or undocumented, they cannot avail themselves of family unification policies, an option typically only available to skilled or professional migrants. Absentee parenting and its impact on children left behind have been subject to scholarly inquiry, in particular, in the context of domestic workers who take up paid care work whilst leaving their own children to the care of others.⁶ Such dynamics are epitomized by the “care chain” concept. Transnational caring practices of marriage migrants in the context of extended families spread geographically and the multi-directionality of transnational care strategies, however, have not been tackled to any great extent.

In sum, what has been missing is a discussion of marriage migration linked to the ongoing debate on the relationship between international migration and development understood in a more inclusive sense, that is social development beyond the macro-economic realm, as well as applied to a transnational context, in relation to structural and institutional challenges of social reproduction and “care crises” on the one hand, and individual coping strategies at the level of extended families on the other hand. The papers included in this thematic issue make a contribution to filling such gaps.

Marriage migration in Southeast and East Asia

The vast majority of marriage migrants from Southeast and East Asia are women. They head primarily to Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. The number of foreign wives by their country of origin in Japan is presented in Table 1. The rapid increase in the number of marriages between Japanese men and foreign women since the late 1980s coincided with a diversification of the nationalities of foreign spouses. For example, in 1965, Korean women comprised approximately eighty percent of foreign brides in Japan. However, a large portion of these foreign brides were in fact Korean residents of Japan who had retained Korean citizenship.⁷ Until the mid-1980s, this trend continued, at which time the percentage of foreign wives from China and the Philippines increased. By 2012, almost eighty percent of foreign wives came from China (41.7 percent), the Philippines (20.5 percent), and Korea (17.5 percent).

Table 1. Countries of origin of foreign wives marrying Japanese husbands, 1965–2013.

Country of origin	1965–1974	1975–1984	1985–1991	1992–1995	1996–2000	2001–2005	2006–2010	2011–2013
South Korea^a	9809	24,913	40,199	19,977	26,120	28,655	23,982	8836
China	2058	10,118	18,594	19,090	37,624	58,487	59,170	21,523
Philippines	–	–	–	25,352	32,724	41,223	39,624	10,925
Thailand	–	–	–	7262	9308	8098	6810	3116
U.S.A.	602	1991	1655	931	1040	850	1025	565
U.K.	–	–	–	360	400	366	312	143
Brazil	–	–	–	2439	2146	1493	1383	660
Peru	–	–	–	590	697	665	554	245
Other	1756	9433	34,910	3517	6762	11,996	13,250	5649
Total	14,225	46,455	95,358	79,518	116,821	151,833	146,110	51,662

Source: Vital Statistics of Japan (2013: Table 9.18).

^aKorean residents in Japan entered there mostly during the colonial period and did not naturalize yet.

The distribution of foreign spouses in Taiwan by source country is presented in Table 2. Until 2003, the share of foreign wives from Mainland China was about sixty percent. Due to changes to Taiwan’s immigration policy in 2004,⁸ the proportion of foreign wives from Mainland China dropped to forty percent. However, their numbers returned to the 2003 level within the following three years. In 2010, their share reached about seventy percent.

Table 2. Countries of origin of foreign wives marrying Taiwanese husbands, 1993–2013^a.

Country of origin	1982–1985	1986–1990	1991–1995	1996–2000	2001–2005	2006–2010	2011–2014
China^b	–	–	–	51,467	109,640	32,293	–
Japan	13	3	1	1	34	23	52
South Korea	280	366	131	109	18	14	23
Malaysia	–	2	21	66	46	52	61
Indonesia	–	12	29	10,018	5878	5679	2381
Thailand	–	0	31	223	399	483	195
Vietnam	–	18	48	3331	12,745	42,482	15,940
Cambodia	–	–	1	520	1604	1927	162
Myanmar	–	–	2	688	439	696	221
Philippines	4	38	74	830	1235	1359	1070
Others	7	14	16	38	41	41	52
Unspecified	29	20	48	38	116	74	43

Source: Department of Household Registration Affairs, MOI.

^aThis data is drawn from acquirement of citizenship by home country.

^bData for China is available from 1998 to 2008.

In South Korea, a similar pattern is evident. As shown in Table 3, in the early 1990s, the leading groups of foreign wives who married Korean men were Chinese (approximately sixty percent), most of whom were ethnic Koreans living in China, and Japanese (about thirty percent). Although there were some fluctuations in this trend, the proportion of Chinese and Japanese foreign spouses gradually decreased until recently, while the proportion of Vietnamese spouses has increased rapidly since the early 2000s. By 2013, approximately one in three foreign wives in South Korea was Vietnamese. As mentioned above, as the countries of origin have diversified since the early 2000s, the number of foreign wives from the Philippines, Cambodia, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, and other countries is also gradually increasing. The rapid decline in fertility and large-scale rural-to-urban migration in East Asia, a trend that started in the 1960s in Japan and subsequently spread to South Korea and Taiwan, has created difficulties for rural men (often farmers and the oldest son, tasked with the duty of caring for elderly parents) to find spouses. This was acknowledged as a serious social problem in the region as early as the 1980s, prompting some local governments and civil organizations to initiate “Matching Drive for Rural Bachelors” campaigns.⁹

Table 3. Countries of origin of foreign wives marrying South Korean husbands, 1993–2013.

Country of origin	1993–1995	1996–2000	2001–2005	2006–2010	2011–2013
China	12,344	27,245	66,418	63,240	20,643
Japan	2799	5926	3927	5746	3651
Vietnam	–	77	10,293	41,892	19,992
Philippines	–	1174	4195	8020	5980
Cambodia	–	1	252	4913	2221
Mongolia	–	64	1697	2572	676
Thailand	–	240	1444	2362	968
Uzbekistan	–	43	1156	1839	958
U.S.A.	645	2941	1477	1895	1670
Laos	–	5	13	96	270
Taiwan	–	22	300	671	578
Malaysia	–	11	70	91	88
Indonesia	–	104	384	411	307
Nepal	–	2	93	792	652
Kazakhstan	–	28	177	115	83
Canada	–	310	303	620	531
Australia	–	74	185	308	257
New Zealand	–	0	36	89	82
Kyrgyzstan	–	19	209	361	391
Russia	–	70	1237	723	309
Other	758	3626	1090	1068	902
Total	16,546	41,982	94,956	137,824	61,209

Source: Vital Statistics of Korea.

National and local governments have influenced marriage migration and migrants’ lives by implementing policies on marriage migration, including those related to the practice of marriage brokerage. Such policy intervention takes place not only in migrant receiving countries such as Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea but also in migrant origin countries such as the Philippines and Vietnam.

Japan has encountered a significant shortage of unskilled labor, including household work. Yet the Japanese government has been reluctant to issue employment visas to low-skilled workers other than trainees or entertainers.¹⁰ Consequently, potential labor migrants from North or Southeast Asia opt for cross-border marriage as an entry strategy. The only other pathway available for the entry of women from poorer neighboring countries into Japan is the infamous “entertainer” visa, resulting in rising numbers of international marriages, especially between Filipina and Thai women and Japanese men.¹¹ During the early 1970s, the number of international marriages in Japan averaged fewer than 5000 cases per year and comprised less than one percent of all marriages (see Figure 1). As in other East Asian countries, international marriages in Japan were mostly between Japanese women and foreign men. The number of international marriages between Japanese men and foreign wives surpassed those between Japanese women and foreign grooms in the mid-1970s, and the overall number of international marriages began to rise during the late 1970s, eventually leveling off after 2000. Since then, the number of international marriages has been steadily declining, and as of 2012, roughly 2.5 percent of all registered marriages were between Japanese citizens and foreigners.

Figure 1. Share of foreign wives as percentage of marriages in South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, 1970–2015

Source: Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare (1970–2012) for Japan; Ministry of Interior, Department of Statistics (2006) for Taiwan; and Korean Statistical Information System (KOSIS) for South Korea.

Although the first wave of foreign wives in Taiwan, particularly from Southeast Asia, began in the 1970s, they did not arrive in significant numbers until the late 1980s (see Figure 1). This coincided with a significant increase in Taiwanese foreign investment in Southeast Asian countries.¹² Cross-border marriage continued to increase during the 1990s, reaching a peak in 2003, when roughly 50,000 cases (seventeen percent of all registered marriages) were international marriages. The share of international marriages declined to 7.0 percent of all marriages in 2010, a trend attributable to a series of government-imposed legal restrictions and penalties on cross-border marriages implemented in 2004.¹³ More specifically, the Taiwanese government instituted a variety of legal restrictions and penalties to limit cross-border marriages and to inhibit marriage fraud.¹⁴ In addition, the number of Taiwanese unmarried men has diminished as a result of the arrival of substantial numbers of foreign wives over previous decades. Hence, assuming the demand for foreign wives will not rise in the short term, it is unlikely that the number will increase.¹⁵

International marriages by South Korean men have had two peak periods (see Figure 1). The first, in the early 1990s, was associated with the “Korean Wind” phenomenon among ethnic Koreans in China and matchmaking efforts to link Korean farmers with ethnic Korean women living in China. The latter were actively arranged by local governments, assemblies, and agricultural organizations in South Korea. The second peak in 2005 can be attributed to the burgeoning commercialization of international marriage agencies in South Korea. In 1999, the licensure requirement for Korean matchmaker agencies was eliminated. This regulatory change not only increased the number of matchmaking agencies and, as a result, the number of international marriages, but also diversified the foreign brides’ countries of origin.¹⁶

The migration policies of source countries have similarly affected the pattern of marriage migration in the East Asian region. Marriage migration policies in the Philippines and Vietnam share many similarities. Commercial matchmaking agencies are illegal in both countries, but these regulations are easily flouted.¹⁷ The Commission on Filipinos Overseas in the Philippines provides mandatory pre-departure counseling to potential brides before they are issued a passport with a spouse visa. In Vietnam, the Vietnam Women’s Union, on behalf of the Vietnamese government, imposes limits on the age difference between potential brides and foreign husbands, sets health requirements for the foreign spouse, and requires a basic level of shared language.¹⁸ These practices directly affect the number of arrivals in South Korea or Taiwan, as both countries require reviews for marriage visas to be conducted in the origin countries.¹⁹

Cambodia is another example where the government has drastically revised its marriage migration polices.²⁰ Although 1804 Cambodian women married South Korean men in 2007, the third largest group of foreign wives in South Korea that year (followed by Chinese and Vietnamese), because of concerns about sexual exploitation, involuntary servitude, human trafficking, and even the death of brides, the Cambodian government banned marriages with South Korean men in 2008 and again in 2010.²¹

In general, the governments of sending countries are increasingly prohibiting the involvement of private agencies in arranging marriages involving one foreigner. Among receiving countries, the Taiwanese government has banned all private matchmaking agencies but has allowed government agencies. In contrast, the South Korean government permits matchmaking agencies that are banned in source countries, a fundamental conflict obviously likely to cause confusion in marriage migration.

The role of social movements

Demanding modification of the policies mentioned in the previous section, social movements to protect the rights of migrant women are burgeoning at local, regional, and global levels in both sending and receiving countries.²² Broadly speaking, these non-governmental organizations (NGOs) resist marriage migration morphing into a dependent variable of development-based policies or market mechanisms. For example, they propose women involved in cross-border migration should not be treated as commodities, and marriage visa screening should be conducted in the direction of ensuring the authenticity of marriage. Their considerable influence has extended to the discussions of inter-governmental organizations, including those at the United Nations. Yet unlike labor migration, marriage migration is being dealt with by several related but scattered organizations, often local NGOs.

In South Korea, the number of migrant-related NGOs increased from approximately thirty in 1994 to over ninety in 2000.²³ As of 2012, a total of 226 NGOs were involved in international migrants’ welfare (ninety-seven), labor conditions (forty-eight), and cultural issues (eight-one).²⁴ These organizations are places to bring grievances occasioned during the marriage process or after marrying; along with various governmental measures, they provide education and training programs to empower migrant women.

The activities of these NGOs impact what happens in sending countries as well. The Philippines has sent more than 10 million migrants abroad, including labor as well as marriage migrants.²⁵ Well-established and active NGO networks assist migrants and their families left behind through advocacy, counseling, and reintegration services. For instance, the Migrante Anak Pamilya and the Episcopal Commission on the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People provide information to entertainers, give legal advice and counseling to migrants and their families, and organize training sessions on finance.²⁶ In Mongolia, the Mongolian Gender Equality Centre has provided a pre-departure orientation program for spouses going to South Korea since 2009.²⁷

Meanwhile, local civic movements initially established in receiving countries have begun to operate transnationally. For instance, the Korea Center for United Nations Human Rights Policy (KOCUN) has been expanding its operations to offer pre-orientation programs for future migrants and support for returning migrants in sending countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines. It also seeks to further the general understanding of marriage migrant women’s situation and everyday experience who have settled in South Korea by bringing activists from sending countries or government officials into the conversation. As a result of these efforts, KOCUN has expanded its networks and cooperation with local NGOs in a number of sending countries, including the Philippines, Mongolia, and Vietnam.

NGOs in receiving countries also form coalitions with those in sending countries. A successful example of collaboration is the Filipina Circle for Advancement and Progress (FICAP), an organization of Filipinas married to Japanese men. FICAP was established in Tokyo in 1995 to educate Filipina marriage migrants in Japan and advocate for their rights and welfare. One of the most remarkable achievements of FICAP is its crucial role in a ruling by the Japanese Supreme Court in June 2008 granting citizenship to “Japinos,” Filipino children that have been abandoned by their Japanese fathers. During the campaign, FICAP closely cooperated with GABRIELA, the most prominent organization among women’s movements in Philippines, and lobbied the Japanese government.²⁸ Another example of collaboration is the Migrant Savings for Alternative Investment (MASI). MASI was originally created as a cooperative effort of Hong Kong-based and Philippines-based NGOs to prepare migrants, most of whom were domestic workers, for their return home. The ultimate goal of MASI is to prevent international migration in the first place.²⁹

Local movements related to marriage migration often form regional movements and then work to encourage existing regional NGOs to participate. For instance, the Migrant Forum in Asia (MFA) was initially established in 1994 to monitor and promote migrant workers’ rights.³⁰ Over the last two decades, it has evolved into a network of over 290 NGOs, associations, trade unions, and individual advocates, not only in source countries such as the Philippines and Bangladesh, but also in host countries, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore.³¹ Some local marriage migrant-related NGOs are participating and cooperating with MFA to address discriminatory laws and policies, violence against marriage migrant women, and other relevant issues.

This issue

This thematic issue is the outcome of contributions made to an international symposium held at Seoul National University in May 2015. It revisits the phenomenon of international marriage in the Asian context through the lens of development understood in broad terms, beyond the macro-economic realm and in relation to transnationalism.

In going beyond the typical framing of the migration-development nexus by taking into account the multiple forms of precarity inherent to marriage migrants’ (paid and unpaid) labor and broader social developmental challenges as they apply to various forms of family life in the context of intra-Asian transnational movements (see Piper and Lee, this issue), the paper by Danièle Bélanger analyzes the impact of large scale outmigration of Vietnamese women to East Asia on their communities of origin, and more specifically the effects on Vietnamese men’s chances of finding spouses – leading to internal migration of women from other parts of Vietnam. Sara Friedman’s contribution to this issue discusses the national anxieties about both the compromised value of marital immigrants applied to the specific case of elite marriage migrants, that is, well educated Mainland Chinese wives of Taiwanese men. It is the wives’ diverse strategies adopted to carve out their own means of producing value through productive and reproductive labors that are focused upon. The thematic issue’s second part (forthcoming in volume 49:1, March 2017) will contain contributions that highlight the importance of government policies, civil society movements, and inter-governmental organizations’ intervention. These papers will also examine the concept of motherhood, addressing marriage migrant women’s transnational caring strategies and challenges, along with the case of divorcees who return home.

Although marriage migration between citizens of Southeast Asian and East Asian states appears to be driven by differences in economic development, the contributions to this thematic issue demonstrate that there are many variants in how, and the manners in which, marriage migration plays out.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported under the framework of the international cooperation program managed by the National Research Foundation of Korea [2013K2A1A2054884]. The authors would like to acknowledge the generous funding by the National Research Foundation of Korea for the research undertaken by the Korean research group on international marriage migration as well as for the organization of an international conference on this topic that took place in May 2015 in Seoul.

Notes

1 Yeoh, Chee, and Baey 2013.

2 Faist 2008; Raghuram 2013.

3 For a list of World Bank publications on Migration and Development, go to Migration and Remittances Team (http://go.worldbank.org/A8EKPX2IA0).

4 Grugel and Piper 2007; Betts 2011.

5 Kim 2010; Yang and Lu 2010.

6 Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Parreñas 2003.

7 Liaw, Ochiai, and Ishikawa 2010.

8 Bélanger, Lee, and Wang 2010.

9 Abelmann and Kim 2004.

10 Lu and Yang 2010.

11 Piper 2003.

12 Yang, Huang, and Tsai 2009.

13 Jones 2012.

14 Seol et al. 2009.

15 Yang, Huang, and Tsai 2009.

16 Lee 2008.

17 Hanh 2013, Kim, Yang, and Torneo 2014.

18 OECD 2012.

19 Wi 2009.

20 For more information, see materials produced by Korea Center for United Nations Human Rights Policy (KOCUN), a Korean NGO (http://www.kocun.org/v1/).

21 Kim, Yang, and Torneo 2014.

22 Lee 2003, Piper 2006.

23 Although there are no official statistics on the number of migrant-related NGOs, Lee 2003 speculates there might have been over 100 in Korea in the early 2000s, with approximately twenty concentrating on migrant women’s issues.

24 NGO Times 2012.

25 Kim, Yang, and Torneo 2014.

26 Bryant 2005.

27 See http://www.kocun.org/v1/load.asp?subPage=231 for more information.

28 Moon 2012.

29 Gibson, Law, and McKay 2001, Macabuag and Dimaandal 2006.

30 Alcid 2004, Macabuag and Dimaandal 2006.

31 Lyons 2009.