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Nationality is a currency that gives people a disproportionate value. The differences on a global scale can become extreme, especially when people of different nationalities fall in – or out, of love.
The Economic Transaction of Marriage
Marriage arrangements that require cash transactions are not a novel practice. Accessing a valuable nationality can be paid for with a defined amount in fiat currency. A few years ago it was 20 thousand euros. The foreigner rolls the dice expecting to meet a person who holds the agreement. The honor of others is the only guarantee they have left when not even the state can protect them.
In Northern California, a Mexican explained that transactions could start at five thousand dollars before Trump’s presidency, but escalated dramatically after the tightening of immigration laws. «You can find it cheaper,» he said, declaring a great truth. I am concerned about people who have access to «cheaper» alternatives. «Cheaper» is less a fiat currency and more of… something else.
A local woman in the same region made frequent visits to the restaurant where her legal husband worked to force him to pay for her heroin addiction. The foreigner’s refusal would have meant retaliation from the local woman, which invariably resulted in his expulsion from the country.
In Berlin, two women, one Colombian and one German, fell in love and got married. For a time, they appeared to be living happy life. However, after a little more than a year, the difference in privilege took the place that had previously been dominated by love. The Colombian woman had to endure physical, psychological, and emotional abuse from her spouse, a disciplined and strict German police officer. When asked why she did not call the police or file a complaint with the immigration authorities, the Colombian woman’s answered, “Who would have the truth, the Colombian immigrant or the German police officer?” In Germany, the foreigner’s value no longer depends on their link to a local only after years.
Could you be loved?
Of course, many people of different nationalities get married and are happy. Still, even if said marriage is a direct result of love and respect, there is much vulnerability that is, by definition, hopelessly disparate.
In her novel, None to Accompany Me, Nadine Gordimer created Bennet, a character who can only measure his life by the one possession he believes he has: the first time he slept with his future wife, Vera Stark, in Drakensberg. He can only understand life through his wife, even when time has passed and life—his and Vera’s—is already other.
At least for a time, a foreign is likely meant to measure their life based on their spouse’s.
Angela Davis notes in Freedom is a Constant Struggle that the issue of marriage is a source of oppression for Black people in the United States (perhaps that assertion was the seed that has me writing today). Social climbing through marriage, which has been depicted as a gain, is nothing more than a costly and painful way of losing freedom.
Let’s couple Davis’ and Gordimer’s reflections with one of the ideas in Mara Marin’s essay, “The vulnerability of Oppression.” It is not that people of different nationalities can’t love each other. In fact, it is because of love that discerning the loss of freedom is especially hard. The situation in which people of different nationalities marry doesn’t automatically create oppression, but it does generate vulnerability to oppression. Aside from disproportionate power dynamics that come with nationality conflicts, there are also cultural and labor barriers, along with the bureaucratic obligations that mainly fall on them.
It cannot be ignored that the above situation creates an emotional and economic vulnerability directly related to the marriage. The local often overlooks the vulnerability of the foreigners, as if what they face were not directly related to the marriage itself and did not create obligations to them.
The latter, coupled with a myriad of other complexities, creates a sense of little value to the foreigner. The vulnerable party may come to believe that they have less value —that their partner is somehow doing them a favor—and thus feel they have to meet their partner’s needs and accommodate their life to fit in with the life of the local, who is worth more, at least in practice. Drakensberg.
To find a solution to such pervasive inequality, we all need to explore solutions. Even if it is the first step is as simple as creating awareness. It is not just a matter of looking with our own eyes—there is so much that goes beyond our existence—but through the eyes of others. Let us look, and let us make others look. Love, the powerful human engine, never exists on its own.
Originally published: America Hates Us
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