How Pakistan took our freedom to marry who we choose

Transnational marriage and the contradictions of multicultural liberalism

The practice of British-Pakistanis finding wives and husbands from ‘back home’ in Pakistan – by means of ‘chain migration’ through spouse visas – remains common, if not the norm. One sympathetic academic article from 2020 observes that while the practice is somewhat on the decline among the younger generations, it ‘continues to be the predominant form of marital alliance among British Pakistani Muslims’, with surveys suggesting that between 2003 and 2018, just over half of British-Pakistani marriages were to ‘a coethnic from Pakistan’. Around another forty percent of marriages were to ‘a coethnic from Britain’. This is clearly a very insular community that is constantly culturally reinforcing itself with new imports from the motherland.

There are a number of motives for this practice on a community level: ‘clannishness’, ‘social conservatism’, ‘patriarchy’. Others, especially those who are wealthy, are motivated by the desire to keep money within the family. But some British-Pakistani men in particular have a rather more mundane, indeed personal, motive: many admit that their British passport gives them a considerable advantage on the ‘marriage market’ in Pakistan, which allows them make up for their weak points – a bad job, or a divorce, for instance – and ‘trade up’ from what would otherwise be available to them at home, including from within the British-Pakistani community.

Frequently, whether a partner is found at home or brought in from abroad, the wife or husband in question is a first or second cousin. A survey of pregnant women in Bradford conducted from 2007 to 2013 found that 62% of ethnic Pakistani women were married to their first or second cousin. This led to high rates of congenital illness: birth defects occurred in 6% of births, approximately double the rate of the rest of the population; relatedly, infant mortality rates were roughly tripled. There is also strong evidence that consanguinity reduces intelligence, especially if repeated over many generations. A follow-up study that took place from 2016 to 2019 found that rates of cousin marriage had fallen somewhat, to 46%, but the practice remains entirely acceptable in the community, even if no longer quite an expectation and increasingly unpopular among many younger women (though naturally they do not always have much of a say in the matter).

This compares to a cousin marriage rate of 0.4% in Britain as a whole, and presumably lower than that if considering only the white British population (on which I have been unable to find any recent data). Protestant countries typically did not prohibit cousin marriage. As such, like most of the rest of Europe (including, it should be noted, most of Catholic Europe) – the United States, where many states have banned cousin marriage, is an outlier in the Western world in this regard – cousin marriage is entirely legal across all of Britain, but is very rare.

In Christendom, cousin marriage was prohibited by the Catholic Church up to the seventh degree (i.e., sixth cousin) until 1215, when this was reduced to the fourth degree (i.e., third cousin) by the Fourth Lateran Council, followed by further relaxations to the third degree in 1917 and the second degree in 1983. Although in practice dispensations were not especially difficult to obtain (meaning that cousin marriage remained fairly common among nobles), marriages that violated the Church’s rules could easily be annulled upon request on the grounds of consanguinity. Henry I of France married Anna of Kiev (who became regent after Henry’s death) in 1051 for this reason — Henry had to look as far away as modern Ukraine to find someone of suitable standing who did not violate the rules. The Orthodox Church prohibited cousin marriage up to the fourth degree, and these rules continue to this day. Some popular maps concerning the practice suggest that in Europe, cousin marriage is currently banned in only Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania, all three of which are Orthodox countries; however, my own cursory research suggests that it is also banned in, at a minimum, Croatia (to the sixth degree, possibly the most restrictive in the world), Macedonia, Moldova, Greece, and Cyprus.¹

---

The practice of marrying cousins from ‘back home’ is a rare form of migration that has achieved fairly widespread condemnation from across almost the entire political spectrum. It seems very likely that these negative views are shared by most white British constituents and politicians, but because the topic is potentially incendiary, some politicians – particularly more left-wing or centrist politicians – will only voice these views behind closed doors, or in coded terms. But even where the practice is not attacked, there is essentially no-one who will actively stand up for it.

It goes without saying that those on the right who are already friendly to immigration restrictionism will oppose the practice. But so too will the average left-of-centre Mumsnetizen. The Mumsnetizen, while perhaps not opposed to the idea of a multiracial, multicultural, multireligious Britain in principle, will object to the practice on basically ‘feminist’ grounds: arranged marriage is (probably correctly) believed to be a conduit for all sorts of undesirable behaviours towards women. In their imagination, perfectly well-educated women, ripe to become good citizens, are being forcibly married off by their ‘community’ to some barbaric, semi-literate cousin from rural Pakistan; instead of getting a fulfilling job, these poor oppressed women are instead chained to the stove, beaten, raped, churning out baby after baby – thus setting back the cause of the Sisterhood.

Yasmin Alibai-Brown goes as far as substantially blaming the crimes of the grooming gangs on the dysfunctional sexual norms that are created by British-Pakistani marriage practices, arguing that these men ‘took the white girls as they took their wives’. Alibai-Brown greatly flatters the ability of feminist-orientated reform to improve matters and inappropriately downplays the inherently racial element of their crimes. Nonetheless, her discussion of the domestic lives of three convicted British-Pakistani rapists who were involved in grooming gangs is still very much worth reading:

…trapped in a world of obedience and ignorance, too many [of the wives] also blame the white teenaged victims for leading their abusers on.

Nila’s mother, Nusrat, was the most confident. She was born in Britain and married a relative, as expected. Three years ago, he divorced her – punishment for opposing his plans to force [her daughter] Nila to marry his second cousin. Today, she works as a dinner lady.

The other two women, Homa and Mariam, came as young, virgin brides from villages in Pakistan. Arriving here, they spoke no English and their mothers-in-law treated them like slaves. The women would not discuss the intimate parts of their lives at first, resorting instead to vague words and platitudes: “Muslim women must give husband”, said one of them. “He want, she don’t like but must give.”

But bit by bit, they opened up, describing a world of loveless sex on demand, of domestic violence, routine debasement. “He did it hard, it hurt”, said Nusrat. “It was always painful. He say I am his toy. I say no, he pushed me down, made me cry. He was like a dog.”

…

I tried to dig further down. How, exactly, did their relationships work? The men, always controlling, had become more so with time, angry as they grew older and as the children grew up. These were marriages with no hugs or kisses, with little overt love and a great deal of fear.

…

Perhaps what took place [i.e., the grooming gangs] was beyond [the women’s] comprehension. They do not seem to understand the concept of consensual sex. In their world, the sex drive is a male urge that must be satisfied…

Those who are a little less to the left on the political spectrum will – echoes of David Cameron – additionally oppose the practice on the grounds of Britain needing a more ‘muscular’ approach to ‘integration’ (Western values!) – some will even cite France, albeit with the caveat that the French policy on burkinis ‘goes too far’. The popular rhetoric at the time was that British-Pakistani marriage practices were creating a ‘first generation in every generation’, and thus needed to be stopped, for the good of the melting pot. It is probably not an exaggeration to say that the highest priority target of the coalition when it came to reducing immigration was this specific visa route. The influence of the idea of ‘integration’ on centre-right policymaking a decade ago cannot be overstated.

After all, one fairly effective method of achieving this ‘integration’ is breaking down tradition through marriages to more liberal ‘outgroups’, or at least restricting a community’s marriage partners to the (hopefully) gradually Westernising ‘ingroup’ in Britain. Sourcing your mate from Pakistan has the effect of helping culturally freeze the community in time.

As previously mentioned, interracial marriages, fairly common among some ethnic groups – such as West Indians and Chinese – are extremely low among Pakistanis, and the same is true of Bangladeshis (though less often mentioned is the only slightly higher rate among Indians). This is probably correctly interpreted by right-liberals as one of many signs of an insular and backward culture that is ‘Westernising’ only very slowly, if at all – indeed, a boilerplate observation among this group is the claim that second generation Muslim immigrants are (allegedly) more socially conservative than first Muslim generation immigrants (and, in particular, that they are more likely to wear a hijab or niqab), culturally diverging from the white British population.

---

As a result, Conservative policy at the Home Office has often targeted this specific visa route, even while often keeping other visa routes relatively open. This has led to a perverse situation where in many ways it is more difficult for a British citizen to obtain a visa for his or her spouse than it is for someone with no connection to the country to obtain a work visa (let alone a study visa, which later grants a work visa). Moreover, these policies restricting spouse visas have, for the most part, been highly unsuccessful.

Since the beginnings of South Asian immigration to Britain, transnational marriage has been the norm among Pakistani Muslims and (as is less well-known) Indian Sikhs, and few rules were in place to counter it. This was until the Thatcher Government introduced the so-called ‘Primary Purpose Rule’ in 1980. This required applicants to prove that the primary purpose of the marriage was not to gain access to Britain. This rule – which was criticised for being somewhat arbitrary in its enforcement – was ‘an easier task for those with a romantic history than for partners to an arranged marriage’. This meant that in practice it led to many rejections of visa applications for Pakistani nationals, even though outwardly the rule seemed to only target actual ‘sham’ marriages.

In 1997, Tony Blair abolished the rule almost immediately upon taking office. The BBC, describing it as ‘one of the toughest immigration rules’, quotes Home Secretary Jack Straw, who explained that he abolished it because

…it is arbitrary, unfair and ineffective and has penalised genuine cases, divided families and unnecessarily increased the administrative burden on the immigration system.

The long-serving Labour MP for Leicester East (and rent boy enthusiast), Keith Vaz, had the following to say:

This is an historic decision… Thousands of people separated under this cruel and malicious rule will now be treated with the respect they deserve. Today's announcement is the first step towards restoring justice to Britain's immigration policy.

Unsurprisingly, visas granted for marriages to Pakistani nationals ballooned in the years following this rule change. Numbers averaged over 8000 per year in the mid-2000s, reaching a peak of 10,000 in 2007, before falling somewhat to 6600 in 2010.

As promised in the Conservative manifesto, the Coalition Government sought to significantly tighten the rules. Changes to Britain’s spouse visa regime were announced in 2012. Firstly, the Coalition’s new rules introduced English language requirements for spouse visas. And secondly, and probably more importantly, the new rules made applicants provide evidence that they could support their spouse (and any dependents) without recourse to the state. The main routes² by which this could be achieved were by: (1) proof of savings (evidence of at least £62,500 in a bank account, assuming no other income); or (2) proof of income (evidence of earnings of at least £18,600/pa).³

Less well-known is the fact that savings below £62,500 can also be used to reduce the minimum income requirement, so long as you are not self-employed, based on the following formula: (Savings - £16,000) ÷ 2.5. For example, £33,000 of cash savings will reduce the minimum income requirement to £11,800/pa.

In 2014, a Migration Observatory report found that

…while 28% of British males working as employees did not earn enough to sponsor a non-EEA spouse, this rose to 57% for their female counterparts. And while 43% of “white” employees did not earn enough to sponsor a non-EEA spouse, this rose to 51% for “non-white” employees. The research further found that “60% of British nationals in their 20s were unlikely to earn enough to sponsor a non-EEA spouse”.

Moreover, British-Pakistanis who were looking for spouse visas almost certainly had a lower income than those British-Pakistanis who were not. The rules were presumably especially daunting for British-Pakistani women looking for a Pakistani national husband, as many British-Pakistani women did not work at all. This meant that this seemingly low income requirement was a lot more significant than it appears.

The new rules evidently had quite an effect: spouse visas granted to Pakistani nationals immediately collapsed to 3500 the following year. But what happened next forces us to depart from the realm of fact, and into the realm of speculation. Somewhat mysteriously, spouse visas granted to Pakistani nationals fairly rapidly recovered to 7000 in 2017, doubling in four years and thereby exceeding the 2011 figures.

Why might this have been? In my view, there are three potential explanations, all of which are mutually compatible:

1. British-Pakistanis took some time to get used to the new paperwork that was required. This may also have required them to more honestly report their income, rather than underreporting it for tax purposes.

2. British-Pakistanis somewhat improved their economic lot, meaning more of them met the income (or savings) requirements. This was helped by inflation, as the requirements were frozen, though this was likely of limited importance given that inflation averaged only 1.5% in these years.

3. British-Pakistanis eventually found methods of fraudulently getting around the new requirements.

The first is almost certainly true. The second, even if true, seems unlikely to be of much importance given the short timespan. The third, while admittedly speculative, is probably also true, and deserves to be examined more closely: the data, which shows a massive decline followed by a fairly rapid recovery seems to suggest as much. But without insider knowledge (such as from the Home Office, British-Pakistanis themselves, or crooked immigration lawyers) there is little firm evidence for us to rely upon. If you happen to have any insider knowledge on this matter, please leave a comment or send us a DM on Twitter. There may also be a cohort effect at work, though I have not seen anyone (including sources sympathetic to this form of migration) suggest this as a mitigating factor for this policy failure.

The method of getting around English language requirements is obvious, namely cheating on the test, as is now known to have been widespread in many test centres. But, in any case, the English requirements are very low: only CEFR A1, and CEFR A2 when extending a visa (indeed, so low that it might not even be worth putting the effort in to cheat).

More interesting is how one might get around the income or savings requirements, which proved to be burdensome even for some white British applicants. Most white British people are not especially personally close to their employer or their colleagues. And, for the most part, they do not have dense networks of financial relations with their extended family. Things are very different in highly ‘clannish’ communities such as the British-Pakistani community. This greatly reduces the barriers to fraud.

One obvious method could be to pool the savings of the extended family, transfer them all to a single bank account, hold the money continuously there for six months as required, print out a bank statement for the application, and then transfer the money back to the original owners. I have, however, been told by former spouse visa applicants that the Home Office is probably not quite so naïve as to be defeated by such an easy trick, as it can ask for an explanation for how the savings were accumulated in the first place. Moreover, £62,500 is probably quite a lot of money for most British-Pakistani extended families, even when pooling savings.

In my view, it is more likely that what fraud there is relies upon cheating the income requirement, which is far harder for the Home Office to check. Many British-Pakistanis work in businesses which handle a lot of cash. Many are also either self-employed, or employed in a business in which they have close personal ties to their employer. Some are even directly employed by a member of their extended family. The evidence required for both salaried and non-salaried employees is the following: six months of payslips (increasing to twelve months if the applicant has been working for their current employer for less than six months), a letter from the applicant’s employer, and bank statements. It would (in my view) be almost impossible to detect a friendly employer bumping up someone’s salary by a few thousand pounds for the application, with the applicant paying back the excess in cash at a later date.

Another known method has been to dodge the requirements altogether by paying to conduct a ‘sham’ marriage with an EEA national (ideally abroad, where there would be less scrutiny), then immediately leaving the EEA national for the preferred British-Pakistani marriage partner once in Britain. This was because EEA nationals were previously exempt from the new requirements. A number of Czech and Slovak nationals were jailed for their involvement in this scam in 2013, shortly after the introduction of the new rules. It is unclear to what extent this scam operated in the years after 2013.

Whatever the reasons – fraud or otherwise – the British government has conspicuously failed to reduce the numbers of spouse visas issued. In 2022, 8941 spouse visas (a.k.a. ‘partner visas’) were issued to Pakistani nationals. In the first three quarters of 2023 alone, 8403 spouse visas have been issued to Pakistani nationals. The data for Q4 has not yet been released, but 2023 thus seems almost certain to break records, and the excuse that this is merely an effect of suppressed immigration during COVID is wearing thin. The grant rate for ‘family-related’ visas for Pakistani nationals – the vast majority of which (around 85% in Q3 2023) were for spouses – was 93%.

As a result, in order to appear ‘tough’ on out-of-control immigration, Rishi Sunak has announced dramatic (and highly unpopular) increases in the income requirements. The minimum requirement will be increased to £29,000/pa in Spring 2024, followed by ‘gradual increases’ to £38,700/pa after this. Needless to say, even the £29,000/pa requirement is a serious impediment to transnational marriage for quite ordinary British citizens of any ethnicity. The £38,700/pa income requirement will completely bar a substantial majority of full-time employees for the main relevant age groups from this visa route: the average full-time income for the 22-29 age group is £26,100/pa, and £33,000/pa for the 30-39 age group.

As a consequence, Britain will soon have quite possibly the most restrictive spouse visa regime in the developed world. British citizens are, in effect, no longer free to marry who they choose.

---

Seeking to control this form of migration while maintaining Britain’s current liberal and multicultural legal and political norms is a case of policymaking with your hands tied behind your back. Ideally, we should much more directly target reducing this form of immigration: treating a young man who has worked abroad in Australia for five years and wants to have his Australian wife come back home with him completely identically to a transnational arranged marriage to an older first cousin who the British partner has met only once in person (as per current minimum requirements) is obviously absurd, but it is this that has led to our highly restrictive spouse visa requirements. It is certainly true that if set high enough, minimum income and savings requirements will eventually succeed at suppressing transnational arranged marriages, but only at an unacceptable cost, robbing ordinary British citizens of their most basic freedoms.

But assuming that we will maintain our current political norms, and will thus be able to only somewhat indirectly target this form of immigration, what is the best way for us to suppress the undesirable marriage practices described in this article? To conclude, I will offer three potential solutions to the problem; but all but the third (which is probably of dubious legality) are, however, only partial solutions at best.

Firstly, a number of mainstream commentators have proposed countering this unwanted phenomenon by banning cousin marriage in Britain, and, relatedly, presumably also barring cousins from obtaining spouse visas in most circumstances, even if the couple was married in a country where the practice is legal.⁴ This is worth pursuing, but has a number of problems. Firstly, the ban would be difficult (or at least very expensive) to enforce: how is it realistically possible for the Home Office to prove that a foreign bride or bridegroom is a British citizen’s first or second cousin? Secondly, even if we assume effective enforcement, British-Pakistanis could just stop marrying their cousins, and marry other Pakistani nationals instead, and still bring along much the same baggage.

Despite these difficulties, I nonetheless support a ban on cousin marriage. A ban would be more easily enforceable for marriages between two partners who are British nationals, and the ability to void cousin marriages (and thus revoke fraudulently obtained visas) after the fact would be a useful tool to have in the British state’s arsenal, even if we accept that many cousin marriages will remain undetected at first.

Secondly, we could build upon existing forced marriage legislation and treat transnational arranged marriages, which lack any evidence of a prior relationship almost by default, as very strong evidence of a forced marriage and thus illegitimate, meaning that a spouse visa cannot be granted. This would also somewhat restrict the mail-order bride phenomenon. Relatedly, Britain could follow Denmark in keeping cousin marriage legal, but treating all transnational cousin marriages as cases of ‘forced marriage’ a priori.

A third option would be to vary the requirements for spouse visas by the nationality of foreign applicant. This is a policy that would skirt the line of both legality and political acceptability in modern Britain. Such a policy would not technically undermine the concept of a ‘race-blind’ state, as it does not imply any difference between British citizens of different ethnicities – which would be unacceptable under current British political norms – as the differing requirements would apply to people who are not, in fact, British citizens. That is to say, the new requirements would apply to non-citizen applicants of certain nationalities.

The fact that most of the cases to which this would apply in practice are ones where people of a certain ethnicity who are not British citizens are marrying people of the same ethnicity who are British citizens should be more or less moot. Indeed, this country already treats citizens of different countries very differently when it comes to almost all other visas, so why not apply this to spouse visas as well? You could also try to make the policy more acceptable by making it appear less ‘targeted’, adding the increased requirements not just to countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh, but also to countries known for mail-order brides, such as the Philippines. Such a policy, however, is very likely to be challenged in court (especially under Article 8 of the ECHR), but I lack the legal knowledge to judge on how likely such a challenge would be to succeed.

---

This article was written by Nigel Forrester, our editor-in-chief. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing. If you are already subscribed, why not upgrade to a paid subscription?

1. As an aside, it appears that the popular claim that ‘the only countries that banned cousin marriage were the ones where it was a problem’ is false, at least without many caveats. Among the nobility, the Orthodox Church more rigidly enforced the ban on consanguinity (up to the fourth degree, i.e., third cousins) than the Catholic Church, at least after 1215. This may have been because of corruption (perhaps partially enabled by the centralisation of power in the Vatican), which meant that wealthy people could easily obtain dispensations from the Pope to marry even first cousins. In fact, the most lax on the matter were Protestant countries, which typically only prohibited consanguinity in the first degree (i.e., siblings); Charles Darwin, infamously, was married to his first cousin. In Europe, cousin marriage is currently banned mainly in Orthodox countries: Romania, Moldova, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Cyprus; though the practice is legal in Ukraine, Belarus, and multi-religious and multi-ethnic Russia. (Ignore the popular maps claiming it is legal in Moldova, Greece, and Cyprus: the most cursory of research will show that they are wrong.)

Within Europe, a number of Balkan countries in particular seem to have had very strong traditions of exogamy, perhaps in some way influenced by their mountainous climate. Albanian tradition dictates that marriage should be to someone more distant than a seventh cousin, and, in some regions, a tenth cousin (i.e., eighth and eleventh degrees). Croatia, while Catholic, seems to have culturally enforced up to the sixth degree, which then became law after the break-up of Yugoslavia, which was dominated by Serbians who followed the Orthodox Church’s fourth degree rules. Bosnia also has a strong tradition of exogamy, despite being majority Muslim. Both Muslim Albanians and Bosnians, responding to coreligionists who are baffled by them ‘despising’ cousin marriage, will note that the Qu’ran does not state that Muslims should marry their cousins, just that it was not prohibited, and that only one of the Prophet Muhammed’s wives was a cousin (and they argue that this marriage was entered into for quite specific reasons).

I have been told that the common claim that these Balkan exogamy rules only apply to the paternal line is apparently false today, although it may have been true in the past. What seems to have happened is that restrictions that traditionally only applied to the patriline at some point also began being applied to the matriline as well, and eventually the norm increasingly became treating both maternal and paternal ancestors identically (a change that occurred in the rest of Europe earlier).

Albania and Bosnia help tell us that cousin marriage therefore seems to be an Arab custom more than anything, which the semi-Arabised Horn of Africa, as well as Pakistan and Bangladesh also share (in the latter two, perhaps because of similar traditions in the rest of the subcontinent, such as subcaste endogamy). Cousin marriage is common in some (but not all) Muslim communities in Indonesia, but the fact that it is also common in Bali once again seems to suggest a need to somewhat downplay the role of Islam. Islam obviously had an effect on marriage customs, but it does not seem to have been completely decisive.

Korea also has had traditionally strong prohibitions on cousin marriage, dating from the Late Joseon dynasty, though these seem to have been much stronger on the paternal line. These continue to this day, with all marriages up to the fourth degree (both maternal and paternal) legally void. In fact, until a legal challenge in 1997, dongseong dongbon marriages, i.e., marriages between those of both the same surname and same ‘clan’ (with some of these ‘clans’, such as the Gimhae Kims, numbering millions of people), were constitutionally banned from marrying in South Korea.

It therefore seems that the strongest predictor of a ban on cousin marriage — outside of the United States, which is an outlier — are traditions of strictly enforced exogamy of any type, whether they are religiously informed, culturally informed, or both. The only other country that follows the American pattern is the People’s Republic of China — which seems to have had no particular tradition of exogamy — which prohibited the practice in 1980 in order to prevent birth defects, and arguably Romania, which under Ceaușescu banned cousin marriage for the same reason (to this day, despite a blanket ban on first cousin marriage, second cousins can get married after ‘genetic testing’) — though in this case it is likely that the Orthodox Church had some influence.

2. Most forms of disability benefits will exempt the applicant from proof of income or savings, so long as they are sufficient ‘maintain and accommodate themselves, the applicant and any dependents adequately in the UK without recourse to public funds’. This does not apply to the vast majority of other benefits (e.g., child benefit, working tax credit, universal credit, etc.).

3. Both income and savings requirements are increased if you have children, though this is irrelevant to most cases of British-Pakistani ‘transnational marriage’.

4. Britain should understand the fact that foreign countries practice cousin marriage, and that this (however unseemly) is none of our business. This means that in most cases we need to continue to recognise cousin marriages that took place abroad. Restrictions should apply only in cases where a cousin marriage took place abroad in order to evade restrictions on cousin marriage in Britain. I do not think that distinguishing these two situations should be particularly difficult.