Abstract
This study explores the role of individual and local marriage market characteristics in whether recently wed U.S. residents “imported” a spouse instead of marrying someone already present in the country. Our findings indicate that U.S. natives and immigrants whose spouse is a “marriage migrant” (someone who arrived in the U.S. the same year as the marriage occurred) are positively selected along some dimensions but negatively along others. The results also suggest that U.S. immigration policy plays an important role in whether immigrants bring in a spouse. We further investigate the trade-offs in spouse characteristics associated with having a marriage-migrant spouse. Marriage-migrant spouses are more likely than other spouses to have characteristics that their spouse may find desirable, such as being relatively younger and less likely to have been previously married. Among naturalized citizens, differences in spousal characteristics between marriage migrants and other spouses are notably large, showcasing the desirability of someone who can easily sponsor a spouse for permanent residence.
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Notes
Kawaguchi and Lee (2017) offer another reason for cross-border marriages in some Asian countries: improved labor market opportunities for women combined with traditional gender roles within households results in men with low socioeconomic status being unable to find wives at home and therefore bringing them in from abroad.
Social media has dubbed U.S.-born men who travel abroad to date or marry women with traditional values “passport bros.”
U.S. citizens can also sponsor a fiancé(e) for a temporary visa, but the couple must wed within 90 days or else the fiancé(e) must leave the U.S. Legal permanent resident visas awarded on the basis of marriage are conditional on remaining married if a couple has been married for less than two years. After two years of marriage, the sponsor can apply for the other spouse’s conditional status to be removed. Spouses of U.S. citizens can apply for naturalized U.S. citizenship beginning three years after they receive a legal permanent resident visa, versus five years for all other legal permanent residents.
Selection into divorce is a concern since cross-border marriages are more likely to end in divorce (Ryabov & Zhang, 2019).
We primarily rely on IPUMS’s spousal matching algorithm to match spouses but also require that both spouses report the same marital status and the same year of marriage. We include only opposite-sex couples who report getting married, which presumably excludes couples entering into domestic partnerships as well as same-sex couples. The U.S. began issuing spousal-based visas to same-sex partners in mid-2013. The U.S. does not award marriage-based visas to opposites-sex couples in domestic partnerships, so entering into a domestic partnership would not benefit potential immigrants in terms of a visa. Our focus on legally-wed couples likely biases the sample toward couples with more traditional values and higher levels of education and income. Based on data from the 2019 ACS, which includes a cohabiting unmarried partners variable, less than 5 percent of recently arrived immigrants are cohabiting but not married. Those immigrants and their partners tend to be younger, less educated, more likely to be Hispanic, and less likely to be Asian than those who are married.
The main exception concerns marriages to unauthorized immigrants, a possibility we discuss in more detail later.
Balistreri et al. (2017) examine both migrants who marry before or in the same year as they arrived and migrants who married after they arrived.
We thank the CFO for providing us with a tabulation of the sex and ages of Filipino spouses, fiance(e)s, and partners of foreign nationals who migrated to the U.S. during the 2010s.
Nonimmigrant dependent visas refers to H-4 visas issued to dependents of temporary workers who hold an H-1B, H-2A, or H-2B visa. The vast majority of H-4 visas are issued to Indians.
This is not possible for some ACS variables, such as enrollment status. We also investigated the role of variables measuring whether someone worked last year and whether the housing unit is owned, not rented. In results not shown here, including either variable does not affect the estimated coefficients on other variables in the regressions. Working last year is not significantly related to marriage-market outcomes. Living in owner-occupied housing is negatively related to having a marriage-migrant spouse. We do not show those results since we do not know who owns the house or when it was purchased. We are unable to determine in the ACS whether someone has children from a previous relationship, which may affect marriage-market outcomes.
Table 1 reports real income, adjusted for inflation using the CPI. The regressions use the inverse hyperbolic sine of real income, which allows us to keep observations with zero income.
We use 17 broad ancestry groups: Western European, Eastern European/Russia/former USSR, Southern European, English, Scandinavian/Nordic, Spanish-speaking Latin American, North American, Caribbean, Brazilian, North African/Arabian/Middle Eastern, Sub-Saharan/South African, Asian Indian, South East Asian, Chinese, Pacific Islander, American Indian, and other. For people under age 23, we left-censor the 10-year age window at age 18. PUMAs are public use microdata areas defined by the Census Bureau.
We classify immigrants as limited English if they self-report not speaking English at least very well. A similar pattern holds if we classify limited English ability as self-reporting not speaking English at least well, or as not speaking English at all.
We also stratified the sample on limited English ability. The results, shown in Table A.2 in the Appendix, indicate that the education gradient in marrying a migrant is more pronounced among immigrant men with limited English than among those who speak English very well. This again may reflect a correlation between education level and type of visa (or lack thereof) among this group.
Dziadula (2022) shows that immigrants are more likely to get divorced after becoming a naturalized citizen.
Tables A.3 and A.4 in the Appendix present descriptive statistics for the samples.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Clara Grillo for her research assistance on this project.
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The authors contributed equally to all parts of the project.
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Appendix
Appendix
Age distribution of marriage migrants from the Philippines, 2010–2019. Data source: 2010–2019 ACS and summary report from the Commission on Filipinos Overseas
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Dziadula, E., Zavodny, M. Finding love abroad: who marries a migrant and what do they gain?. Rev Econ Household (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-023-09690-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-023-09690-6