10 lines
1.8 KiB
Markdown
10 lines
1.8 KiB
Markdown
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title: "Protection Marriage - Schutzehe"
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“There are many reasons to marry, one being solidarity and support for refugees and immigrants. Marriage is a possibility to protect people from deportation and help provide them with permanent residential rights.” These are the opening words of a multilingual guide (available in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian-Montenegrin, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Turkish) to Protection Marriage[^1], written by the artist Silke Wagner as part of the exhibition "Niemand ist eine Insel" at the Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst in Bremen 2003 and drafted initially in 1999 within a kein mensch ist illegal publication.
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Marriages and civil partnerships between migrants and citizenship-holders, between foreigners and locals, are subject to scrutiny in a manner that other marriages and civil partnerships are not, no matter if they are out of interest or out of “romantic love”. Ultimately, marriage is a formalisation of a social unit that has undeniable material and ideological underpinnings in modern societies, a privileged way of securing economic stability, child-rearing and social reproduction, with its internal divisions of domestic labor and care. Therefore, interest and entitlements are always present in every marriage, however are expected to remain tacit.
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As the German collective against discrimination D.A.S.H points out, the scrutiny and the criminalisation of binational marriages has to stop. After all, the same motive of citizens of other countries that were willing to marry Germans fleeing Nazi prosecution is held in high regard. However, protection marriage is just a patch on a system that produces injustices. Therefore, the right to residence should be universalised, so as to make married foreigners not dependent on their local counterparts for their right to stay in a country.
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