The integration of immigrants into a host society is a problem of widespread concern. This project, by graduate student Johanna Yngvason under the direction of Dr. E. Paul Durrenberger, will open up a relatively unexplored aspect of international migration by assessing the role of marriage in population flows, offering insight to any country with an influx of female labor migrants and brides from abroad, including the United States. This project will use ethnographic field methods to examine marriage and labor migration of Thai women to Iceland and will assess how these channels differentially affect integration into the Icelandic community.
Yngvason estimates from her preliminary fieldwork in August 2005 that at least half of the Thai migrant women came specifically to marry Icelanders, while the rest of the women came for labor opportunities and are kin of the marriage migrants. Yngvason will collect further data during 12 months of ethnographic work among Thai migrants in Iceland (approximately 800 individuals) using participant-observation and surveys among a random sample of 260 individuals; she will then compare outcomes between the two groups in terms of the degree of their integration into Icelandic society. The survey will complement daily interaction with the population to measure Icelandic language skills and usage, type and density of networks, choices of leisure activities and cuisine, religious institutional involvement, and activities with people in Thailand.
This study will enhance anthropology's contribution to migration studies through the ethnographic understanding of marriage and the economy as predictors of women's migration. The study will also contribute to an understanding of how people negotiate cultural differences and under what circumstances they try or do not try to do so. Iceland has no shared borders, creating an optimal situation for the documentation and observation of immigrants and their level of integration in their host society. The results of the study have implications for the formation of national policies on immigration. The project will also contribute significantly to the education of a female social scientist.
