A mail-order bride is a woman who lists herself in catalogs and is selected by a man for marriage. In the twentieth century, the trend was russian citizenship via marriage towards women living in developing countries seeking men in more developed nations. In the twenty-first century, the trend is now based primarily on internet-based meeting places which do not per se qualify as mail-order bride services. Mail-order brides work with “international marriage agencies”.
American men who had headed west across the United States to work out on the frontier. European American men found financial success in the migration West, but the one thing that was missing was the company of a wife. Very few women lived there at this time, so it was hard for these men to settle down and start a family. Asian men also worked through mail-order agencies to find wives as they worked overseas in the 1800s.
Key variables determining the relationship between migration and marriage were demographics, legal policies, cultural perceptions and technology. Imbalances between the number of available women and the number of men desiring partners created a demand for immigrant women. Women in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and other Eastern European countries are common mail-order bride candidates. Economic and social conditions for women in Russia and other Postsoviet countries are a motivational factor in finding foreign arrangements. Postsoviet countries such as Lithuania, Latvia, Georgia and Armenia. Finding a foreign husband gives a woman a chance to leave her country and find better economic opportunities. Marriage is a substantial part of Russian culture, with 30 years being the age at which a woman is considered an “old maid”.
Many international brides come from developing countries in Asia. The countries the women come from are faced with unemployment, malnutrition and inflation. Since 2003, the Government of Australia’s resolve to decrease what was deemed “inappropriate immigration” by then-Prime Minister John Howard has gained momentum. Initial reactions to the program were mixed. In 2005, President Alexander Lukashenko attempted to regulate “marriage agencies” in Belarus and make it difficult for them to operate. He believed that Western men were draining his country of women of child-bearing age. There have been reported instances in which foreign spouses have abandoned their Canadian sponsors upon arrival in Canada or soon thereafter, often collecting welfare, which the sponsor is obligated to repay.
2011 and is now applied to new arrivals. China is one of the main Heritage countries of East Asian Mail-order brides. According to immigration statistics from the United States Department of Homeland Security, Colombia has ranked in the top 10 of countries since 1999 from which fiancées have emigrated for the United States. 89, passed in 1988, foreigners are allowed to marry nationals in the country provided they supply the proper paperwork, including a birth certificate and proof that both parties are not already married. A notary is required, but because the laws are open to interpretation, the requirements can vary from notary to notary. During the 1980s and 1990s, local authorities started government-led initiatives encouraging marriage between women from other Asian countries and Japanese farmers due to the lack of Japanese women who wanted to live in the countryside.
These Asian brides came from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, China and South Korea. The Philippines prohibits the business of organizing or facilitating marriages between Filipinas and foreign men. The Philippine congress enacted the Anti Mail-Order Bride Law on June 13, 1990, as a result of stories in the local media about Filipinas being abused by their foreign husbands. Successful prosecution under this statute is rare or non-existent as widespread deployment of the Internet in the mid-1990s brought a proliferation of websites operating outside the Philippines which legally remain beyond the reach of Filipino law. The New York Times reports, “Every month, hundreds of South Korean men fly to Vietnam, the Philippines, Nepal and Uzbekistan on special trips. An agent escorts each man to see many women in a single day, sometimes all gathered in the same hall”. The Korea Times reports that every year, thousands of Korean men sign up for matches with Filipina brides through agencies and by mail order.
Based on data from the Korean government, there are 6,191 Filipinas in South Korea who are married to Koreans. An anthropological study on Filipina wives and Korean men by professor Kim Min-jung of the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Kangwon National University found that these Korean men find it difficult to marry Korean women, so they look for girls in poorer countries with difficult economic circumstances. A recent study by matchmaking firm Bien-Aller polled 274 single South Korean men through its website concerning motivations for marrying non-Korean women and found that men choose foreign brides primarily for one of four reasons. 1 percent of the men said they felt the biggest benefit of marrying foreign women is their lack of interest in their groom’s educational background and financial or social status. The majority of mail order brides from China to South Korea consist of Chinese citizens of Korean ethnicity. In June 2013, The Philippine embassy in Seoul reported that it had received many complaints from Filipinas who have married Korean men through mail-order, frequently becoming “victims of grave abuses”. There have been several murders of mail-order brides in South Korea.
