CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 24Migration, Refugees, and IntegrationGender and Women's RightsMigration and Exile Studies

Language as a new instrument of border control: the regulation of marriage migration from Morocco to Germany

Gutekunst, Miriam·2015·The Journal of North African Studies
DOI 10.1080/13629387.2015.1065038
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

In 2007, the German government introduced the requirement of a language certificate for citizens of ‘third countries’ who want to join their spouses in the Federal Republic. Thereby, Germany followed the example of the Netherlands, Austria, the UK and France. German policy-makers have justified this language certificate as a measure to facilitate integration before entering the country. Drawing on the Moroccan case, this paper challenges this dominant integration argument and shows the actual consequences of this new instrument of border control. This paper argues that the language certificate leads above all to the hierarchisation of marriage migrants and even to the exclusion of certain candidates, depending on their educational background and financial means. The history of marriage migration from Morocco to Germany shows that family migration, especially of spouses, has a long tradition and has always been the special target of restrictions and control. However, the required language certificate leads to a new level of control. While marriage migration is traditionally based on a private matter, namely the decision to marry someone and to share life together, the utilitarian logic of a neoliberal migration management has found its way into the control of this form of migration. This is also visible in the externalisation of the border regime in the sense of an out-sourcing of migration management, whereby institutions such as language schools have become an integrated part of Germany's border control system.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1080/13629387.2015.1065038

Cites

16 of 16 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • As a result of pre-entry language requirements, family reunification or family forming is prevented, and spouses may be separated for years, if not permanently.

    “As a result, family reunification or family forming is prevented, and spouses may be separated for years, if not permanently (Gutekunst 2015).”

    From Prejudice and Discrimination Toward Immigrants (2021) · cites this paper as Gutekunst 2015

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Gutekunst, M.
Affiliations
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (DE)
Corresponding author
Gutekunst, Miriam
Venue
The Journal of North African Studies
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Published
2015-07-21
Volume
20
Issue
4
Pages
540-552
ISSN
  • 1362-9387 (ISSN-L)
  • 1743-9345
DOI
10.1080/13629387.2015.1065038
OpenAlex
W1879829472
Cited by
24
References
16
Citations by year
2026: 1 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 1 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 1
FWCI
3.32
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
The Journal of North African Studies (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Migration, Refugees, and Integration
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Gender and Women's Rights
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Migration and Exile Studies
Keywords
marriage migration, language certificates, border control, Moroccan immigrants, family reunification, integration policy, language schools, Germany

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review