Legal-discursive constructions of genuine cross-border love in Belgian marriage fraud investigations

Cross-border marriage applications by a Belgian citizen/resident with a non-European citizen/resident have in recent years become heavily scrutinised by municipal authorities in Belgium in an attempt to crack down on... [ view full abstract ]

Cross-border marriage applications by a Belgian citizen/resident with a non-European citizen/resident have in recent years become heavily scrutinised by municipal authorities in Belgium in an attempt to crack down on immigration fraud, as the statute of legal marriage in Belgium warrants residency rights for the non-European spouse. In implementing a marriage fraud investigation, municipal civil servants work with a legislative framework that lists 13 indicators which are thought to characterise fraudulent marriages and which need to be verified and uncovered by civil servants through interviewing the applicants separately (and, at times, repeatedly) in the investigation. These indicators include age difference, suspect accounts of the relationship narrative, a criminal history, no common language, unfamiliarity with the partner’s family, culture, past or work, etc. The more of these indicators apply to a marriage application, the more likely the application will be denied because of alleged fraud suspicion. This legal framework as ratified in institutional practice thus to some extent projects a certain ideological and normalised view of what a genuine relationship and a bureaucratically approvable marriage entails in Belgium. This paper aims to reach a better understanding of the discursive and multilingual processes involved in enacting this institutional view on marriage and in policing complexities of cross-border and globally superdiverse human relationships.

By a linguistic ethnographic analysis of interview encounters and institutional reports collected in several municipal centres in Belgium, this paper addresses the following questions: how are particular legal indicators and cultural practices discursively negotiated and multilingually co-constructed in talk in the interview setting? How does the elicited information and narrative become monolingually entextualised in institutional reports and evaluated in the ultimate decision-making? And, finally, how much discursive agency can applicants resort to in challenging legal-discursive constructions of a so-called genuine marriage when these bureaucratic notions clash with their actual, lived relationship and personal marital reality? In analysing such discursive and interactional aspects of Belgian marriage fraud investigations, this papers finishes with considering ways for improvement and resituating institutional practice.