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Paper short abstract:

In marriage and family relations, like in all social relations, power comes into play. For migrant and transnational families, migration processes can have a significant impact on power relations in the family. Moreover, migration law can be a powerful tool in transnational family conflicts.

Paper long abstract:

In marriage and family relations, like in all social relations, power comes into play. For migrant and transnational families the migration process can have a significant impact on power relations in the family. Especially when there are differences between family members with regard to residence status, migration law can be a powerful tool in transnational family conflicts. For example, when family members have a dependent residence status, the sponsoring family member can invoke the state's power in conflicts and have the other expelled from the country of residence. As migration law can limit the mobility of some family members more than others, depending on nationality, crossing borders during family conflicts can also help escape obligations such as child care or maintenance. These possibilities to use migration law as a resource in family conflicts are closely connected to intersections of gender, social class and, especially, nationality, which in itself is often gendered. Especially in marriages between partners from the West and the global South, western nationality produces a position privileged over other nationalities with regard to mobility and rights of residence.

In this paper, I aim to shed further light on how migration processes affect inter-family power relations in families where one spouse is a migrant while the other is not. Drawing on interviews with spouses divorced from Dutch-Moroccan and Dutch-Egyptian mixed and migrant marriages and additional interviews with legal professionals, NGOs, social workers and embassy personnel, I will focus specifically on the role of migration law in transnational family conflicts.