183 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018 N. E. Riley, J. Brunson (eds.), International Handbook on Gender and Demographic Processes, International Handbooks of Population 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1290-1_13 Gender and Migration: Evidence from Transnational Marriage Migration Danièle Bélanger and Andrea Flynn 13.1 Introduction ‘Internet marriages’, ‘mail bride orders’, ‘bogus marriages’ and the ‘the selling of sex for visas’ are among the themes found in popular media reporting on international marriage migration. Many sensationalist accounts accuse marriage migrants of abusing migration policies through fake marriages, while other reports portray women marriage migrants as victims of trafick- ing. In 2007, for example, The New York Times reported on the story of Vietnamese women and Korean men who marry through matchmaking agencies. The article vividly described how fol- lowing a man’s quick marriage tour to choose a foreign wife, the bride obtains a spousal visa and eventually emigrates to South Korea as a perma- nent resident (Onishi 2007, February). Such depictions of marriage as a commercialized and arranged process fuels stereotypes of Asian women as commodities. In the leading Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, the story of Lanie Towell made headlines in 2009 when she claimed having been deceived by her West African husband, whom she met in Guinea. After their wedding, he migrated to Ottawa only to dis- appear a mere month later (Bielski 2009, April 30). In this case, ill-intentioned immigrants are shown as potentially abusing honest Canadian citizens and Canada’s generous immigration pol- icies (see Flynn 2011). In Taiwan, the signiicant in-low of women marriage migrants from China, Vietnam and Indonesia is referred to by the press as a ‘social problem’ because ‘foreign brides’ come from developing countries and therefore can lower the overall quality of the Taiwanese population (Hsia 2007; Wang and Bélanger 2008). In Vietnam, a sending country of marriage migrants, the press depicts women who marry foreigners as the ‘shame of the nation’, or as ignorant women who become victims of trafick- ing (Bélanger et al. 2013). These few examples indicate that the phenomenon of marriage migra- tion generates intense controversy and leads to very polarized stereotypes. Marriage migration powerfully captures how migration, a demo- graphic and social phenomenon, is highly con- tentious and gendered. The connection between marriage and migra- tion is not altogether new, in the sense that mar- riage has historically often meant a shift in place, particularly for women. Throughout much of Asia, for instance, patrilocal and patrilineal mari- tal kinship systems require women to migrate internally to their husband’s place of residence (Palriwala and Uberoi 2005). What is new is the sheer scale on which marriage migration is occur- ring, both in terms of volume (i.e., number of D. Bélanger (*) Département de géographie, Université Laval, Québec, QC, Canada A. Flynn Quality & Performance, London Health Sciences Centre, London, ON, Canada 13