Marriage Channels, Temporal Inequality, and Migration Decision-Making Agency: Vietnamese Marriage Migrants in Asia

Recent scholarship has examined the multiple dimensions of structural and cultural inequalities that impact the well-being of intra-Asia marriage migrants in both sending and receiving countries. One missing mechanism that may shape varied patterns of pre- and post-migration inequalities — the different marriage channels that facilitate different types of encounters between prospective brides from emerging economies and prospective grooms from advanced economies — deserves more theoretical and empirical attention. Based on over 100 life-history interviews with Vietnamese marriage migrants in Taiwan and South Korea, our analysis shows how women's meeting their foreign spouse through personal encounters, introduction networks, or commercial brokers denotes their relatively advantaged, constrained, or disadvantaged structural and cultural circumstances and, in turn, shapes the time available for them for expressing decision-making agency. We argue that marriage channel serves as an intermediate stratifying mechanism — an unequal space, reflecting migrant women's differential socioeconomic positions and gendered familial obligations in Vietnam and shaping a hidden dimension of inequality — temporal inequality — that is embedded in the processes of migration decision-making across different marriage channels. Our theorization of marriage channels and how they reflect the interplay between time for expressing agency and socio-cultural circumstances illuminates a comprehensive contextualization of the social phenomenon of intra-Asia marriage migration in the pre-migration phase. Through considering how both economic and non-economic factors shape marriage migration decision-making processes and their impacts on women's time for expressing agency across different marriage channels, our study contributes to scholarship on gender, time and women's agency, intra-Asia marriage migration, and international migration decision-making.