Anti-immigration rhetoric treats arranged marriage within one’s own ethnic group as proof of coercion

Evidence

The statistics offered are as follows: family reunification accounts for 75 per cent of all immigration to Norway, and those granted residency are for the most part spouses and children. Among all marriages of first-generation immigrant women 75 per cent are with men who share their cultural background, and of these 40 per cent are men from outside Norway. (This leaves, of course, 60 per cent of marriages contracted with partners in Norway, although of the same ethnic group.) Of marriages by first-generation men 90 per cent are with women of their own national background. Turks and Pakistanis are most likely to conform to this pattern. Significantly, the patterns do not change with the second generation. Very few immigrants, either firstor second-generation, marry ‘ethnic Norwegians,’ that is to say, Norwegians of European origin. Since the underlying problem is that feudal cultures are reproducing on European soil, the book does not concern itself with the pattern among ethnic Norwegians to also marry overwhelmingly within their own racial and cultural group. Importantly, no statistics are offered to support the connection that is made between the pattern of marriage practices and forced marriages. It is simply assumed that many of the marriages contracted with partners of the same ethnic background who live outside Norway necessarily entail coercion. Here the practice of arranged marriage is itself proof of coercion. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 261

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the analytical move of racialized groups’ norms being read as pathology — echoes Sherene Razack’s broader ‘culturalization of racism’ thesis and my interest in how institutions disguise racial governance as concern.
• SEED: Angle: ‘when demographic facts become crimes’ — how endogamy, universally practiced, gets criminalized only when it’s a Muslim minority doing it. A short essay comparing the statistical silence on ethnic Norwegian endogamy with the forensic attention to Muslim marriage patterns.