Family reunification, migration strategies and transnational marriage markets

Andreu Domingo, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Xiana Bueno, Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics (CED)
Juan Galeano, Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics (CED)

Legislation in many European countries usually entails a shared misunderstanding in the field of family reunification. These, used to take for granted that family formation took place before than the migratory movement of one of the couple members did. Nevertheless, Is well known that family reunification involve, not only families which were conformed before migration, but also those families created after the migration of one of its members. This difference becomes significant when, taking into account the specific migration strategies of some national groups, theirs family and migratory cycles, we attempt to perceive the possible emergence of transnational marriage markets. Our aim is twofold. Firstly, discriminate among the family reunification strategies throughout original administrative registered data in Catalonia between 2004 and 2010. Secondly, explore and characterize, trough Demographic Survey of Catalonia from 2007, those family reunifications that are non-reflected in the previous dataset, which are the ones conformed even after migration take place.