Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how interest, emotions and sexual pleasure are articulated in the marriages between legally precarious African migrants and citizens of the EU periphery that enabled the African spouses to lawfully reside in the Netherlands.

Paper long abstract:

In an era of restrictive immigration regimes, especially towards working-class labour migration, marriage remains one of the few channels to international mobility and migrant legality. Statistical data and ethnographic observations indicate a recent shift in the marital preferences of Nigerian and Ghanaian migrants in the Netherlands from Dutch citizens of African, Afro-Caribbean, and ethnic Dutch origin to non-Dutch EU citizens (e.g. Poland, Greece). This paper examines the marriages between legally precarious African migrants and citizens of the EU periphery that enabled the African spouses to lawfully reside in the Netherlands as family member of mobile Europeans. In a context of generous migration rights granted to spouses of EU citizens under the EU free movement provisions, the paper examines why African male migrants opt for peripheral European women rather than for other EU citizens, for example Germans, in the Netherlands. Studies of cross-border marriages have pointed out the power discrepancies within bi-national couples - usually between citizen men and migrant women. Based on ethnographic material collected in multi-sited fieldwork in the Netherlands, Ghana, and Greece, this paper looks closely how interest, emotions and sex are articulated in these marriages. It shows that African migrants in the Netherlands navigate the highly asymmetrical dynamic of mixed-status marriage by choosing, as partners, peripheral Europeans, who are EU citizens, but, as working class migrants, are in a similar structural position in Dutch society. Thus the exchange of resources, money, emotions and sexual pleasure between spouses has a more reciprocal character and create less strong dependency relations.