ABSTRACT
Siham got married one and a half years ago. Since then she has been learning German – every day. Her husband, Thomas, has met her four times since the day of their wedding, when he came to visit her. The rest of the time they communicate only by phone. Thomas lives in a small town in Baden-Württemberg in Germany, Siham with her family in Casablanca, the biggest city in Morocco. The 29-year-old woman invests much time and energy in learning German, a completely new language for her. Four times a week she takes a grand taxi (shared taxi) to a small private school in the city centre. Classes last three hours. As soon as she is back home, she repeats what she has learned and does her homework. To study in quiet, she has an extra room on the top floor
The Journal of North African Studies, 2015 Vol. 20, No. 4, 540-552, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2015.1065038
of her family’s house. The walls in this room are covered with worksheets: under different pictures and objects, Siham has written German words. She uses only capital letters, uneven in size and shaky. It calls to mind a first-year pupil’s handwriting. And in fact, Siham has just started to learn how to write. Before taking German classes, she was not literate, either in Arabic or in the Roman alphabet. She has never attended school. The language exam at the Goethe Institute in Casablanca, a requirement for spouses who aim to migrate to Germany, will be the first examination in her life. Since her marriage to Thomas, she has been thinking of nothing else and is afraid of failing. The language certificate Siham is struggling with was introduced by the German government in
2007. In the context of marriage migration, the 2007 reform of the immigration law-besides raising the minimum age of spouses to 18 years – entails the obligation to prove German language skills at the A1 level (first level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) before being entitled to apply for a visa. This requirement applies to citizens from so-called ‘third countries’ (all countries that are not member of the European Union (EU)) who aim to live with their partner in Germany. At the time, the German government emphasised that this measure was aimed at facilitating the integration of spouses, and especially women, once they arrived in Germany (Bundesregierung 2007). The implementation of the language certificate requirement led to a wave of protest in
Germany. Different Turkish associations and other migrant organisations were indignant at the changes. They objected that the regulation discriminated against nationals from certain states. Indeed, citizens from the USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, Brazil, Honduras and Israel are not required to pass a language exam to get a visa for spousal migration (Zur Nieden 2009, 126) ‘because of long-standing and close relations’, as the German Government explained in a requested statement (Bundesregierung 2014). With these changes in immigration law, Germany has followed other countries in the EU like the Netherlands, the UK, France and Austria, which also require a language certificate from marriage migrants. This new regulation is part of a trend in Europe and North America towards calls for stricter controls and an optimisation of the management of international migration flows (D’Aoust 2013, 258). This paper challenges the dominant integration argument as legitimisation for the language
certificate in the context of spousal migration and shows the actual consequences of this relatively new requirement. Drawing on the Moroccan case, I argue that the language certificate leads above all to the hierarchisation of marriage migrants and even to an exclusion of certain candidates, depending on their educational background and financial means. Although marriage migration is traditionally based on a private matter – namely the decision to marry someone and to share life together – and is protected by the right to marriage and family life enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the utilitarian logic of a neoliberal migration management has also found its way into the control of this form of migration. The following analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in 2013/2014 in
different cities in Morocco. I made use of the methodological approach of the Ethnographic Border Regime analysis developed by Sabine Hess, Vassilis Tsianos and the Transit Migration Research Group. The idea is to analyse the function and the constitution of the border starting from the meaningful practices of the actors (Hess and Tsianos 2010, 255). For my research, this involved conducting interviews and carrying out participant observation in the institutions involved in the border regime, like for example the Goethe Institute and several private language schools. To complement the information gathered, I also accompanied around 15 couples during a
The Journal of North African Studies 541
1. Introduction
Siham got married one and a half years ago. Since then she has been learning German – every day. Her husband, Thomas, has met her four times since the day of their wedding, when he came to visit her. The rest of the time they communicate only by phone. Thomas lives in a small town in Baden-Württemberg in Germany, Siham with her family in Casablanca, the biggest city in Morocco. The 29-year-old woman invests much time and energy in learning German, a completely new language for her. Four times a week she takes a grand taxi (shared taxi) to a small private school in the city centre. Classes last three hours. As soon as she is back home, she repeats what she has learned and does her homework. To study in quiet, she has an extra room on the top floor
The Journal of North African Studies, 2015 Vol. 20, No. 4, 540-552, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2015.1065038
