Earlier this week, provisions of the Civil Registration (Amendment) Act 2014 came into effect which, essentially, turn marriage registrars into immigration agents. Henceforth, non-EU nationals who wish to marry in Ireland must give the registrar evidence of their immigration status. If the registrar suspects that it is to be a marriage of convenience – defined in the statute as where at least one of the parties enters it “solely for the purpose of securing an immigration advantage” (I’ll come back to this later) – then the registrar now has the power to demand all sorts of personal information from the parties. If you want to see the full list of factors deemed relevant to this consideration, scroll about halfway down this page. If the registrar and their superintendent decide that yes, this would be a marriage of convenience, then they are obliged to refuse to register the marriage, and report the couple to the Minister for Justice.
The Minister issued a press statement in which she welcomed the new rules, presenting so-called “sham marriage” as a violence against women issue:
A non EEA national coming to the end of his immigration permission or without any immigration permission can contract a sham marriage with an EU national to extend their permission. Women are exploited in such arrangements and even if money changes hands there is obviously scope for coercion and intimidation.
I am also deeply concerned that in some instances women may be trafficked to Ireland with a view to being forced into sham marriages.
Continuing this theme the next day, the Irish Examiner reported:
In 2013 the Council of Europe asked Ireland to amend the law to include sham marriages as a form of exploitation and give gardaí powers to intervene in such cases.
It was estimated that 400 women were being trafficked into Ireland to take part in such ceremonies. Many of these came from Latvia, which complained about the situation under Irish law.
That statistic was patent BS, but even so, I wondered where it originally came from. Googling only threw up an earlier Examiner article with the even more ludicrous claim of 400 trafficked per year. Needless to say, the actual Council of Europe reports said nothing of the sort, so I took to Twitter to see if anyone had any clue:
Anyone know source of claim of 400 trafficked into Ireland for “sham marriage”? http://t.co/IwZoCsA2rl @shaunconnolly01 @irishexaminer
— Wendy Lyon (@wendylyon) August 20, 2015
I’ve looked in 2013 Council of Europe reports for Ireland and Latvia – nothing remotely like that. @shaunconnolly01 @irishexaminer
— Wendy Lyon (@wendylyon) August 20, 2015
In fact,Ireland report quotes Irish authorities saying NO such cases had been found. http://t.co/KlFNMvRFj2 @shaunconnolly01 @irishexaminer
— Wendy Lyon (@wendylyon) August 20, 2015
Sure enough, the Twitter hivemind soon came to the rescue:
@wendylyon @paulageraghty @shaunconnolly01 @irishexaminer Maybe a statistic from a while ago, from Latvian police. http://t.co/YcDIEneWSR
— Dublin Inquirer (@DublinInquirer) August 20, 2015
And to my complete non-surprise, what the 400 figure at the source link actually comes from is this line:
Latvian police estimate that last year up to 400 Latvian women took part in sham marriages with Asian men in Ireland.
If this sounds tediously familiar, it’s because exactly the same process is responsible for some of the more absurd “sex trafficking” claims, such as the one about Finland having 40,000 victims per year (the source for which is an Interpol report, not online, which estimated that around that many women visit Finland each year to voluntarily sell sex). But such wild numbers are even dafter for this alleged form of trafficking, because there’s a really key difference: the women are coming to Ireland to take part in a regulated activity, one that already has a substantial degree of government oversight.
You wouldn’t know this from the Minister’s press statement, or pretty much any of its media coverage. The ordinary reader would assume that Inga and Ali can just fly into Dublin Airport, go straight to the Civil Registration Office, and then head for GNIB to register his Irish green card. And, furthermore, that there’s nothing anyone can do about it (or could do about it, until these new measures saved the day).
The truth is there’s actually a lot more involved in getting Irish residency as the spouse of an EU citizen. Leaving aside the issue of having to get to Ireland in the first place, first they have to go through Irish marriage registration procedures. This means booking an appointment with a registrar (usually at some delay), gathering all the documentation the registrar will ask for (if Ali doesn’t already have a PPS number, he’s in for a lot of fun trying to get one) – and even once all these preliminaries are done, they still have to wait three months to actually get married. Only then can Ali apply for EU-Fam residency, and only if Inga is actually exercising her EU Treaty rights in Ireland (which usually means working). They have to complete and jointly sign the application form, submit their original passports and a pile of other documents to INIS, and then wait up to six months for a decision. Just before the final decision is made, INIS will usually ask them to submit up-to-date evidence of their cohabitation and Inga’s employment. So all told, we’re looking at probably around a minimum nine months – after the agreement to get married – before Ali’s residency is secured. And even then, it’s not really secure: he’ll lose it if Inga leaves the State, stops working or goes for a quickie divorce in Latvia before three years are up.
It’s a procedure that just doesn’t easily lend itself to human trafficking. It takes too long, and the “victim” would have too many opportunities to raise the alarm. That’s not to say it doesn’t ever happen, but it really doesn’t seem like it would pass the “worth the hassle” test for many people. Especially if it’s true, as is alleged, that there are thousands of EU national women all too willing to pocket the cash and keep up the façade voluntarily.
What’s also being missed is that the registrars and INIS already have powers to deal with any such cases that arise. While it is not, as far as I can tell, specifically set out in legislation, both the Health Service Executive and the Department of Social Protection – the two bodies that oversee the registration process – regard the free consent of the parties as a mandatory ingredient in a lawful marriage. If the registrar had genuine grounds to believe Inga was not consenting, s/he would therefore have reasonable cause not to issue the marriage registration form. And the Free Movement Regulations already specifically exclude parties to a “marriage of convenience”. Immigration officers can already carry out investigations into couples applying for EU Treaty rights, and at least in some cases, they do: I’ve seen an FOI file with a record of telephone calls made to the EU national’s workplace to verify her employment. It may be the case that our civil servants aren’t actually doing enough to prevent trafficking for marriage, but they don’t need new laws to be able to do it.
Now as I noted in my series of tweets above, in 2013 the Irish government stated that it had not found any cases of trafficking for forced marriage. The 2013 Annual Report of the Anti-Human Trafficking Unit doesn’t mention any either, while a subsequent analysis of potential and suspected trafficking cases in 2013-2014 only notes about half a dozen cases of “other” forms of trafficking, a category which includes forced begging and criminality as well as marriage, without any further breakdown. Unless her department is even more dysfunctional than we realise, the Minister for Justice is aware of these statistics, so what is she on about when she says she’s “deeply concerned”? I think there’s two possibilities here. One is that she thinks women* are such delicate little flowers that we are not capable of giving real consent to what she calls a “sham marriage”, and therefore they’re all human trafficking cases. The other is that she knows full well that they aren’t, and is cynically exploiting the moral panic around human trafficking in order to make these rules look more like an anti-VAW measure, and less like the racist immigration controls that they actually are.
* Eastern European and Portuguese women, anyway. No concern seems to have been expressed for the Irish women getting married in other countries.
It’s also telling that the only kind of “marriage of convenience” these new rules apply to is one aimed at deriving a benefit in terms of immigration status. It is still perfectly ok to marry someone just for a financial benefit, whether that accrues to yourself or to your family.
Not a “marriage of convenience”
Also not a “marriage of convenience”
What the new law actually does, then, is create a principle that two people may lawfully consent to marriage for any reason whatsoever except to gain an immigration advantage. There is only one category of people whose reasons for getting married can be lawfully (and, it must be said, quite intrusively) interrogated and – well, what do you know! – they happen to be non-EU nationals. In practice, of course, they are likely to only be certain types of non-EU nationals, specifically the brown ones.
So whatever about the intention behind these rules, they will inevitably be racist in their application. Registrars, who are already overworked if the waiting lists are anything to go by, are certainly not going to be in a hurry to play 20 Questions with every EU/non-EU couple who makes an appointment. They’ll make the same assumptions the Minister has, that is, that Eastern European and Asian relationships are so “statistically improbable” that at least some of them have to be fake. I’m not inclined to blame the registrars who do racially profile these couples, incidentally; there is still uncertainty as to whether they’ll face any consequences if a marriage they let go ahead is later determined to be a “sham”.
The strangest thing about this whole business is that the NGO who you’d expect to be objecting loudest to this, the Immigrant Council of Ireland, has actually endorsed* both the concept of “sham marriage” and the “need” for state intervention. I don’t know if they’ve responded to the new law; their social media pages have been silent on it. But certainly, their advocacy in favour of keeping out certain immigrants would not have gone unnoticed by the Department of Justice. If there is anything about this issue that should give rise to “deep concern”, the collaboration of migrant sector NGOs with unavoidably racist methods of border control surely has to be at the top of the list.
*Link has been edited to provide screenshot, as the original post was subsequently deleted from their Facebook page.
Feminist Ire 
The Minister’s claim that the marriage pairings are “statistically improbable” more than implies that an analysis was done to check for significant differences between the EUTR statistics (or the GRO statistics) and some baseline marriage statistics. It’s probably not even worth exploring how difficult that analysis would be in terms of finding valid comparison data or controlling for confounding variables – we know there wasn’t even a rudimentary statistical analysis.
The EUTR application figures reported by press are conspicuously devoid of even contextual stats – like a comparison of the increase in total applications compared to the increase in Portuguese applications over the same time period. Or a comparison to the number of applications based on UK nationals. The narrative drives the stats, as usual.
There is a connection here with the language school crisis. 17 language schools have closed in the last 18 months. The narrative presented by the media and the government is that these were ‘visa factories’, scam operations where the ‘students’ came to Ireland to work and never attended classes. They were closing as a result of much needed regulation of the sector etc.
None of this is actually true. There was a high court case to prevent the proposed regulations being introduced, which would have assessed a school on academic standards only, not on compliance with visa standards, (but would have made the issuing of visas dependent on academic standards set by the department of Education and QQI). The INIS already has the power to inspect schools and, if unsatisfied, cease issuing visas. AFAIK, only 2 of the closed schools were found to be having problems with visa compliance. In 2014, the INIS only performed 7 inspections, so the 14 closures that year were not a result of any government crackdown.
One of the first schools to close, Eden College, had former minister Bat O’Keefe on its board. It was closed down amid an investigation by the Fraud Squad when they discovered the college had facilitated 60 marriages between Polish women and Pakistani men, for the purpose of acquiring an EU visa.
I suspect that this was actually the reason for the sudden desire to crackdown on language schools – the suspicion that many, if not most, are facilitating such marriages.
Thanks for that Liam – very interesting, and another reason why these new laws are not really necessary, but just a way for INIS to outsource duties that are really not appropriate to outsource.
The narrative presented at the height of the closures seemed to mainly involve Venezuelan students, and Venezuelan citizens were added to the “visa-required” list. What was that all about then?
I’m not entirely familiar with how that end of the EFL industry works. All non-EES students need a student visa to come here to study. But students from certain countries find it easier than other countries. Chinese and Mongolian students used to find it easy to come here; now, the focus is on Latin American students. The vast majority of such students are from Brazil. Venezuela has limits on how much money you can take out of the country, so I believe there may have been concern over the students being able to support themselves. (Students are officially supposed to be able to support themselves for the duration of their stay. They were allowed to work 20 hours a week. In practice, students would work as many hours as they needed to, obviously. It’s hard to earn enough to live on working as bar staff for 20 hours a week).
Other countries don’t allow students to work, so course, this made Ireland an attractive destination to study.
In my experience, as an EFL teacher of 15 years, the vast majority of these students didn’t come here to work. They came to study. The vast majority, c. 90%, either go home or go to university, and then go home. They have careers in their home countries, many are lawyers, IT professionals, graphic designers. Some are doctors. They aren’t giving that up to wait tables in Dublin.
The narrative presented in the media was that they ‘come here to work’. I know of barely a handful that ‘disappeared’ into the labour market. Most people in the profession, like me, are simply at a loss to understand where this narrative comes from. The decimation of the sector has caused enormous suffering to thousands of students, and Irish teachers, and damage to Ireland’s international reputation. There is enormous speculation within the sector as to why this has been allowed to happen, (a few weeks ago, the Minister for Education said she expected more schools to close).
It’s only speculation on my part, but I suspect a connection with these ‘sham marriages’. I had a student from Latvia who was married to a man from Bangladesh. Another man from Bangladesh enquired at my school about classes for his Hungarian wife. And another colleague of mine described an Estonian student with very poor English who dealt with the school through her Indian husband. These are precisely the types of relationships that a registrar would now have the power to object to.
Also, there is nothing to suggest these women were trafficked or coerced in any way. But that is the narrative that is now being presented.
Technically it’s a student permission not a student visa that students from non-visa required nationalities need. Venezuela used to be one such nationality, but when this happened they were added to the visa required list.
Yes, that’s true, thanks for the correction.
Under the previous system, a student’s one year permission allowed them to attend classes for 6 months while working 20 hours per week, and for the other 6 months, they could work full time. Most students used this 6 month period to earn enough money to pay for their next course in a language school, and renew their visa.
Under the new proposals, students will still have 6 months of classes, but only 2 months of holidays where they can work, (the total length of the permission is 8 months). Combined with the fact that the schools closing have been almost exclusively from the cheaper end of the market, and the governments advice to students is to go to a more expensive school, this means the majority of students simply won’t be able to afford to come here. And many of those already here will have to leave, especially those who lost their tuition fees when a school closed.
This is the government’s solution to the alleged problem of students coming here and disappearing into the labour market and not attending any of their classes. However, the only students likely to be affected by these proposals are the ones attending classes.
It seems an odd solution to adopt.