Laws of Love: Negotiations of Intimacy and Legitimacy At and Beyond State Borders in Vietnamese “Marriage Fraud” Arrangements

Abstract

In 2011, the Canadian government launched a nation-wide anti-marriage fraud campaign,announcing its intentions to crack down on instances of fraudulent marriage. This dissertation examines the phenomenon of đám cưới giả arrangements (Vietnamese to English translation meaning “fake weddings”) as a site of inquiry at the intersection of state governance, citizenship, race, family structure, and belonging. I intervene in interdisciplinary law and society scholarship by drawing on over 18 months of ethnography (2018-2020) working as an immigration case specialist at an immigration law and consulting firm to document and excavate intimacy mechanisms that highlight how the messiness of intimate relationships cannot be predicted by, captured, nor fit neatly into state-based logics and policies governing family reunification and citizenship. Drawing on interviews and follow-up interviews with a total of 41 individuals, including migration intermediaries and participants in đám cưới giả, my dissertation shows how love, intimacy, and legitimacy are negotiated, presented, performed, and challenged at and beyond Canadian borders. I follow the trajectory of đám cưới giả from the moment of its inception, when a broker successfully recruits and secures participants for a đám cưới giả arrangement, to its ‘aftermath,’ where participants in said arrangements either separate, file for divorce, or choose to remain together. In doing so, this dissertation examines the motivations underlying individuals’ decisions to participate in đám cưới giả arrangements, as well as the social metamorphoses that they undergo through their interactions and engagement with formal immigration processes. In this dissertation, I argue for the theorization of ‘marriage fraud’ as a form of what Irefer to as citizenship remittance rather than as organized crime. I also explore the paradoxes that arise in the policies and practices of anti-marriage fraud legislation and show how immigration policies inadvertently authorize the disproportionate policing of cross-border relationships along classed, gendered, and racialized lines. Migrants actively reconfigure understandings of intimacy in response and resistance to restrictive border regimes; in doing so, they challenge dichotomous understandings of love as either ‘real’ or ‘fake,’ highlighting how seemingly neutral border policies can shape and be shaped by what I refer to as strategic intimacies.