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.

摘要

近年来，婚姻移民作为家庭团聚的一种形式，已成为欧洲成员国对移民治理日益关注的政策问题，并且面对据称数量庞大且不断增加的假象，这被视为欧盟移民政策中的“最后漏洞”非欧洲配偶获得居留许可的婚姻。因此，几个欧洲国家已经立法了法律行政措施，通过在庆祝或承认婚姻联盟之前调查跨境婚姻申请来打击便利婚姻。在本文中，我将对比利时市政当局进行的法律行政调查进行语言人种学实证研究，以确定向其民事登记处提出的跨境婚姻申请是“真实的”还是“伪造的”。特别是，