Legal-discursive constructions of genuine cross-border love in Belgian marriage fraud investigations

ABSTRACT

In recent years, marriage migration as a form of family reunification has become a growing policy concern for migration governance in European member states and is seen as ‘the last loophole’ in EU migration policy in the face of a supposedly large and increasing number of sham marriages through which the non-European spouse is granted a residency permit. Several European nations have therefore legislated legal-administrative measures to battle marriages of convenience by investigating cross-border marriage applications prior to celebrating or recognising the marital union. In this article, I draw on a linguistic ethnographic empirical study of legal-administrative investigations conducted by Belgian municipal authorities to determine whether cross-border marriage applications to their civil registry office are ‘genuine’ or ‘fake’. In particular, I examine how the legal framework and guidelines for investigation are bureaucratically implemented in practice in Belgian civil registry offices with a particular focus on the role of a discursively constructed notion of genuine cross-border love and a bureaucratically acceptable relationship in both policy documents and interviewing practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Marriage of convenience
• Belgium
• bureaucratic interviews

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Mieke Vandenbroucke, a tenure-track assistant professor in pragmatics at the University of Antwerp, works on both urban multilingualism and institutional discourse. Her work has been published in numerous outlets, including Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language in Society and the Oxford Handbook of Language and Society.

Notes

1 I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the guest editors, Georgina Turner and Laura Paterson for their insightful and valuable comments. I would also like to thank Stef Slembrouck, Aaron Cicourel, Bart Defrancq, Betty de Hart and the DANASWAC members for commenting on earlier versions of the paper. Any errors remain my own.

2 Marriages of convenience are marriages between two partners that are contracted for the sole purpose of attaining an economic, social or political advantage and that therefore are not characterised by mutual affection or an intent to embark on a durable marital union. Frequently used synonyms are sham marriages, fake marriages or fraudulent marriages. In the context of marriage migration, the advantage achieved through a marriage of convenience is a residency permit for the migrating spouse.

3 This interview format is also known as the Stokes interview in US marriage migration control.