How Does the Chinese Bride Interview Policy Deter False Marriages in Taiwan?
Date Issued
2008
Date
2008
Author(s)
Lu, Mei-Yin
Abstract
As transnational marriage boomed in the past decade, it also aroused growing concerns in Taiwan, particularly of false marriage, or fake marital relationship. In order to reduce the number of false marriage and thus Chinese illegal immigration traffic, the government embarked on an interview policy at year-end 2003 requiring that all Chinese spouses be interviewed before they come to Taiwan and register their marriage. Only those who pass the interview are allowed to register marriage in Taiwan. The number of registered Chinese spouses dropped from 34,426 persons in 2003 to 10,972 persons in 2004, which at first sight seemed to be a great achievement by the tight policy. However, only when the percentage of false marriage drops can this policy be considered successful. In reality, the actual ratio of falsehood to all registered transnational marriage might never be determined. This paper attempts to solve this problem and proposes a few substitutive indicators as an alternative way to verify the effectiveness of the interview policy. This paper digs into the reason why Taiwanese men marry foreign women, evaluates the incentive system behind false marriage, and further proposes “no childbearing within two years after marriage” as an indicator for false marriage in that Taiwanese men in search of foreign spouses are most likely to be bachelors from traditional families where sons must bear the obligation to propagate. On the other hand, the validity of using “divorce within 1-2 years” as an indicator for false marriage is doubtful due to conflicting incentives faced by falsely wedded couples. Hence this paper attempts to measure the average treatment effect of the visa interview policy with the first indicator. By merging different official national registry data sets, all couples wedded during 1998-2006 and their post-marital performances (whether they got divorced or had born children afterwards) are identified. This paper adopts “differences-in-differences” strategy to analyze the average treatment effect by comparing two different groups of foreign couples, the couples married with Chinese brides as a policy-affected (treatment) group and the couples married with Southeast Asian brides as a policy-unaffected (control) group. The empirical results show that the interview policy has reduced the prevalence of false marriage by 10%-14%.
Subjects
Transnational marriage
False marriage
Foreign bride
New immigrant
Program evaluation
Type
thesis
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