The Nov 12 issue of The Economist featured an interesting article on international marriages (“Herr and Madame, Senor and Mrs”) which seems timely as many governments around the world are imposing/maintaining restrictions on family migration and family reunification, arguing, for example, that cross-border marriages destabilise their societies (or ethnic homogeneity), that they are often exploitative (e.g. between an older richer man and a younger woman from a poor country) and should thus be prevented, or that there is a high risk of ‘sham marriages’ for the sole purpose of gaining legal status for the ‘foreign’ spouse.

Drawing particularly on research and sources in Asia and Europe, the article discusses global trends and local phenomena around marriages involving partners of different nationalities.

Some key insights the article presents are:

• “While international marriages seem to be on the rise globally, Asia is the part of the world where cross-border marriages have been rising most consistently.” For example, in 5% of marriages in Japan in 2008-09 included a foreign spouse (with four times as many foreign wives as husbands), compared to less than 1% before 1980. In South Korea over 10% of marriages included a foreigner in 2010, up from 3.5% in 2000. 
• “While in Europe and America marriage tends to follow migration, in Asia people often marry to migrate.” This is exemplified by reference to arranged marriages in South Korea between Korean men and women from other Asian countries, or marriages in Taiwan between Taiwanese men and Vietnamese women, for which prospective grooms pay up to $20,000-30,000. There seem to be different reasons for men in such countries looking for ‘foreign brides’: the so-called “marriage strike” in richer East and South-East Asian countries, as well as ‘gaps’ in the local marriage markets caused in some countries by a preference for males at birth. 

The article goes on discussing the controversial nature of marriages “between girls from poor countries and older men from rich ones”

• “As Sang-lim Lee of the International Organisation of Migration centre in Goyang says, when men pay the brides’ family “they tend to think they have bought a good. If it has a defect, they think they can send it back.”…  It is true that some young women are victims of cruelty, neglect, physical abuse and trafficking. Women in strange countries are almost always vulnerable. The media in Vietnam tend to portray migrant brides either as victims of trafficking or people driven by desperate poverty to migrate… However, while “Vietnamese girls are seen in much of Asia as the paradigm of the submissive foreign bride,” a study of their role in Taiwan shows that many are married to men whose companies trade with Vietnam - and they are vital to the companies’ future. 
• “Remittances to families left behind help keep the practice alive in Vietnam, even though many young men there dislike it and say they have been driven out of their villages by the shortage of brides and forced to migrate to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Similarly, marriage abroad is seen as so desirable by the Punjabi diaspora that the press in Punjab is full of advertisements offering to arrange marriages abroad.”
• However, this is not the dominant pattern, nor the sole one. For example, “in a “reverse migration” Japanese women from rich Tokyo have married into poor peasant families in South-East Asia—especially in Bali and Thailand—and settled down to live a more “authentic” rural life, perhaps as a way of escaping the strictness of Japanese family life.” 
• “Children of international marriages in South Korea have more health problem than average. In Taiwan, they do less well at school—something that occurs in European countries, too. Nevertheless, international marriages often seem to work for the couple involved—at least if the longevity of their union is any guide.”