Laws of Love: Negotiations of Intimacy and Legitimacy At and Beyond State Borders in Vietnamese “Marriage Fraud” Arrangements
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2011, the Canadian government launched a nation-wide anti-marriage fraud campaign,announcing its intentions to crack down on instances of fraudulent marriage. This dissertation examines the phenomenon of đám cưới giả arrangements (Vietnamese to English translation meaning “fake weddings”) as a site of inquiry at the intersection of state governance, citizenship, race, family structure, and belonging. I intervene in interdisciplinary law and society scholarship by drawing on over 18 months of ethnography (2018-2020) working as an immigration case specialist at an immigration law and consulting firm to document and excavate intimacy mechanisms that highlight how the messiness of intimate relationships cannot be predicted by, captured, nor fit neatly into state-based logics and policies governing family reunification and citizenship. Drawing on interviews and follow-up interviews with a total of 41 individuals, including migration intermediaries and participants in đám cưới giả, my dissertation shows how love, intimacy, and legitimacy are negotiated, presented, performed, and challenged at and beyond Canadian borders. I follow the trajectory of đám cưới giả from the moment of its inception, when a broker successfully recruits and secures participants for a đám cưới giả arrangement, to its ‘aftermath,’ where participants in said arrangements either separate, file for divorce, or choose to remain together. In doing so, this dissertation examines the motivations underlying individuals’ decisions to participate in đám cưới giả arrangements, as well as the social metamorphoses that they undergo through their interactions and engagement with formal immigration processes. In this dissertation, I argue for the theorization of ‘marriage fraud’ as a form of what Irefer to as citizenship remittance rather than as organized crime. I also explore the paradoxes that arise in the policies and practices of anti-marriage fraud legislation and show how immigration policies inadvertently authorize the disproportionate policing of cross-border relationships along classed, gendered, and racialized lines. Migrants actively reconfigure understandings of intimacy in response and resistance to restrictive border regimes; in doing so, they challenge dichotomous understandings of love as either ‘real’ or ‘fake,’ highlighting how seemingly neutral border policies can shape and be shaped by what I refer to as strategic intimacies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".