‘Take a Chance on Me’

Abstract

The steady decline of marriage rates in North American and European countries since the 1960s seems to have relegated marriage’s political role in relation to the state, a topic that deeply concerned prolific English writer Gilbert Chesterton in the 1920s, to a state of historical curiosity and obsolescence. If Chesterton’s words appear to have lost their relevance in regard to divorce, his initial object of concern, they nonetheless still appear to directly tap into the complex links, real or apprehended, that currently bind the state, citizenship, bodies and family when it comes to marriage migration. Indeed, though marriage migration was “relatively insignificant in the early phases of post-War immigration”, it has become the object of more intense scrutiny in the past twenty years, as family-related migration became the main legal mode of entry in Europe as well as in the United States (Kraler, 2010, p. 23). Even ignored in recent state-of-the-art surveys of migration governance (e.g. Betts, 2011; Kunz et al., 2011), such neglect certainly betrays assumptions about labour migration being the main concern of migration controls. Empirically, the lack of attention paid to marriage migration (which is itself only one dimension of family reunification or formation¹) as a valid “political object of political inquiry” certainly reflects assumed dichotomies, such as those between the rational and emotional realms, and between autonomy and dependency.

It is simply that in such society the government, in dealing with the family, deals with something almost as permanent and self-renewing as itself. There can be a continuous family policy, like a continuous foreign policy. (Chesterton, 1920, pp. 39–40)

Tout le monde a droit A. l’amour, mais il faut respecter les règles. (Everybody has the right to love, but you have to respect the rules’. A reader’s comment to an article detailing increases of sham marriages in Belgium: RTL, 2011)