The choice of a marriage partner is a personal freedom which couldn't and shouldn't be restricted. However, economic conditions, the prevailing social mood, and government policy can impact transnational marriages in numerous ways.

And while the governments of Taiwan and Vietnam have not changed their official position of neither encouraging nor barring transnational marriages, the number of Taiwanese-Vietnamese marriages has been falling-in 2006 there were only 3,226, down from a peak of 13,863 in 2000.

Over the last decade or so, the trend towards "exporting" Taiwanese husbands and "importing" Vietnamese brides rose up then receded from our shores like a passing wave. From fewer than 1,500 in 1995, the numbers shot up over 10,000 per year in the 2000-2004 period, then plummeted to between 3,000 and 4,000 in 2005-2006 (see graph). But, unlike a wave, these marriages have had lingering effects and given rise to issues that continue to plague both Taiwan and Vietnam.

When the number of Taiwanese-Vietnamese marriages exploded a few years ago, both the Taiwanese and Vietnamese governments stated that they would neither encourage nor hinder the phenomenon. But they also began making quiet changes to their marriage regulations. Over the last two years, both have used "government interference" and tight controls on marriage brokers to bring the number of marriages down 75% from their peak.

Most of the Taiwanese men who went on broker-arranged trips to Vietnam to find a bride used to be able to "seal the deal" in five days at a cost of about NT$300,000. They'd choose a woman on the first day; talk to the family and deal with the paperwork on the second; arrange for a physical and group interview on the third; register the marriage and hold a banquet on the fourth; and return to Taiwan on the fifth. When the marriage certificate came through, the groom would fly back to Vietnam to pick up his bride and bring her back to Taiwan.

But since the Ho Chi Minh City TECO instituted one-on-one interviews in 2005, couples have had to wait six months for the necessary appointment. For its part, the Vietnamese government now requires that both the bride and groom appear in person to register their marriage-it used to allow one partner to do so on behalf of the couple-and that the groom be younger than the bride's father. These new measures don't affect Taiwanese living in Vietnam, but represent a major hurdle to men in Taiwan thinking about acquiring a Vietnamese bride. The process of meeting someone, going through the official interview, and actually getting married now requires three trips, putting it beyond the financial means of many men.

"This six months is a cooling-off period, a time to think," says Chen Shan-lin, head of the Ho Chi Minh City TECO. He says it was ridiculous that people could go from meeting to marrying in just five days. Now that couples have six months to settle down and think a bit, they have time to change their minds. According to Chen, about 20% do so.

Like Taiwan, South Korea has become an important "export market" for Vietnamese brides, and marriage brokers have proliferated there as well. In addition to establishing an interdepartmental task force to look into the situation, the South Korean government has begun studying Taiwan's approach to reducing the number of brokered marriages. In fact, the South Koreans sent a delegation of 14 officials and experts to talk to TECO's Chen in July. They were seeking to understand why Taiwan's interview mechanism had been more effective than their own at filtering out bogus marriages.

"The difference is that the Koreans allow couples to marry before interviewing them, whereas the Taiwanese system requires the interview before the marriage," explains Chen. "Our system also requires that couples have the marriage certificate in hand before applying for entry into Taiwan."

Minimizing scams and misery

Taiwan's Executive Yuan formally established the National Immigration Agency in January and has also been actively revising the Immigration Act.

"In the past, we demanded too little of those marrying a foreign spouse," says Chen. "Our policy was based on respect for human rights and an unwillingness to become involved in personal matters." But, he explains, unscrupulous brokers and human traffickers have used marriage as a means to bring Vietnamese women into Taiwan for various kinds of work, even prostitution. The results have been tragic. "We are not the least bit opposed to marital freedom. But we want to exclude people who clearly have no means of making a successful marriage."

Chen also disagrees with those who worry that the wait for an interview is too long. He says that from 1999 the number of couples getting married increased dramatically, and the interview queue grew to more than a year long. Then the marriage brokers pushed legislators to establish a nine-month and then a three-month deadline. In the end, TECO was forced to do group interviews.

From October 1999 to 2004, group interviews involving 50-60 couples at a time were common. More like Taiwanese-Vietnamese marriage orientations than actual interviews, they were useless for evaluating the validity of pending marriages. After becoming director-general, Chen reinstated individual interviews in January 2005. Currently, about 65% of couples pass.

"The reason people have to wait is that the government doesn't have the resources," says Chen. "We can only interview about 30 couples per day. When there are a lot of people, they naturally have to wait. We're already the most lenient country in the world in terms of what we ask of couples: we don't require them to speak each other's languages and we don't demand that they've known each other for six months." Chen contrasts that with the US, where he says a couple must have known one another for a minimum of six months before applying for a marriage visa, and must submit a report on their relationship before getting into the interview queue. In the US, waiting times for interviews are a minimum of two years.

"In the past, our migration policy tended to be lax about emigration and strict about immigration," says Steve Wu, deputy director-general of the National Immigration Agency. "But when it comes to marriage-related immigration, we've only been strict about Chinese spouses. We have no ceilings or other limitations on those from elsewhere." Wu says that the annual quotas for Chinese-12,000 persons for residence permits and 6,000 persons for citizenship-mean that it takes a mainland Chinese spouse about eight years to become a Republic of China national. The less stringent criteria for Vietnamese spouses mean that they, in contrast, can become nationals in just three to four years.

The Immigration Act amendments currently under review in the Legislative Yuan have become the target of much heated argument. The draft legislation requires that foreign spouses applying for citizenship have NT$414,720 in the bank, or that the couple show average monthly income for the preceding year of NT$34,560, or twice the minimum wage. This financial hurdle has sparked protests from the Coalition against Financial Requirements for Immigrants. Wu says the purpose of the requirement is to ensure that such families have enough money to subsist on and is in keeping with the desire of foreign spouses to establish good lives for themselves in Taiwan. The requirement, he says, is in no way prejudicial. Moreover, when compared to the approximately NT$1 million required by the South Korean government, Taiwan's threshold of just twice the minimum wage is very low.

The draft legislation also calls for marriage brokerages to become volunteer or non-profit service organizations that cannot advertise. The brokers naturally oppose this provision, arguing that it ignores the marriage rights of disadvantaged men as well as eliminating their own livelihoods. They have even taken to the streets to protest.

Legislators are still weighing the human rights questions against national policy and commercial interests against the related social problems, making it difficult to predict what shape the legislation will ultimately take. However it turns out, we can be sure that the only way to guarantee that Taiwanese and Vietnamese families and societies all come out ahead is to provide past, present and future Taiwanese-Vietnamese married couples with the respect and safeguards they deserve.