Immigration, Migration, and Society - Assignment Example

World Bank report estimates that about 15 percent of world’s population is immigrants. However, of late, the issue of marriage migration has developed a lot of interest to many scholars and feminist. It is considered to have been hugely affected by neoliberal policies occasioned by poverty and has increased tremendously over the last decade in Asia. This paper will explore marriage migration in light of the issues of immigration, migration and the society. Marriage migration is a collective term meaning cross-border marriages involving women migrating to their husband’s home country.

Study show that most women migrants originate from developing countries with their husbands-to-be hailing from developed countries with advanced economy. Statistics show that, between 1989 and 1999, more than 175,000 Filipinos registered, were either married, or engaged to foreign spouses with 91 percent being Filipino women (Kim and State University of New York at Albany, 2008). The reason that triggers women migration varies from one individual to the next. Some of them state that theirs is due to economic rise from poverty.

Kim and State University of New York at Albany (2008) note that, women who hail from developing countries seek partners from developed countries mainly for economic reasons. In many cases, those women who come from poor backgrounds tend to be influenced by the belief that if they get married to a foreigner, then they would be able to come out of poverty. This explains why many women immigrants who get married to foreigners come mainly from poor countries. Others get married to foreigners as a way of securing work, with others resorting to it just for romantic love.

Study also reveals that some women marry foreigners out of curiosity and prestige of living abroad while some are for purposes of relieving themselves from family problems. Kim and State University of New York (2008) argue that economic security and other tangible benefits-legal citizenship from marriage are particularly stressed when looking at international marriage in relation to migrant sex workers, stressing the underlying link between sex trafficking and “mail-border brides”. In this connection, they show that many Thai women who migrate to Germany as prostitutes looked for German husbands as a way of leaving prostitution or to obtain legal status for them to be able to continue working in Germany legally.

Others meet and marry German men who happened to be their clients in Thailand and later came to Germany. A study also affirms that not only personal motives for a ‘better life’ but also encounters by chance with unification can encourage women to be involved in marriage migration. As such, men’s and women’s desire for masculine fulfillment and feminine status coupled with heteronormative cultural and social expectations and pressure from the society serves as vital motive (Freeman, 2005).

Freeman (2005) conducted a field study in both China and South Korea to study Korean-Chinese joseonjok women’s mobility or their need for upward class and geographical mobility. She reveals that many joseonjok women enter marriages of convenience. These women, who are ambitious, with mobile outlooks, search for greener pastures in South Korea and more than often, got married to Korean men