Sexuality, Migration, and the Shifting Line Between Legal and Illegal Status

Abstract

Focusing on the U.S. campaign to secure recognition of same-sex couple relationships within immigration law, this article brings the scholarship about the social construction of undocumented immigration into critical conversation with queer studies. Challenging neoliberal representations of legal or illegal immigrant status as a sign of individual character, rather than as an outcome of multiple relations of power, the article highlights the central role of sexual regimes in constructing the distinction between legal and illegal. The article further explores, however, how sexual regimes always function in relation to crosscutting hierarchies of race, gender, class, and geopolitics. This suggests that the campaign for recognition of same-sex couples must address the multiple underpinnings of the il/legal distinction or else risk benefiting only the most privileged. The article then examines how recognized couple relationships provide the technology through which the state and its assemblages attempt to manage the risks associated with immigration and, over time, to transform legally admitted immigrants into “good” neoliberal citizens—while threatening those who do not measure up with potential illegalization. These dynamics raise important questions about citizenship, surveillance, discipline, and normalization that merit consideration by those struggling for recognition of same-sex couples within immigration law. They also enable us to further reconceptualize the legal/illegal distinction as an ongoing (rather than one-time) production, anchored in multiple relations of power that include, but are not limited to, sexuality. I conclude by questioning whether and to what extent sexuality may provide a locus for renegotiating the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants and its associated logics of violence.

Immigration, Emigration, and Citizenship

“…In pre-1945 migration, immigration policies gave these ideas the force of law often defining the category 'immigrant' as a male head of household. More recently, legally inscribed conventional gender categories and sexualities have been challenged by the migration of same-sex partners and of individuals who defy traditional expressions of sexuality (Luibhéid, 2008). The postwar feminization of migration has been linked by scholars to neoliberal market reforms, the massive movement of women into the workplace in the Global north, and implicitly, men's unwillingness to contribute labor in the household economy (Salazar Parreñas, 2005).…”

Immigrant sexual citizenship: intersectional templates among Mexican gay immigrants to the USA

“…A rights-based conception of sexual citizenship can be invoked to describe the claiming or granting of asylum on the basis of a right to freedom from persecution on the basis of one's sexual identity (Carrillo 2010). A focus on group-based claims to equality characterizes recent efforts in the United States to extend to gay binational couples (where one partner is a citizen or permanent resident and the other is a foreign national) the same rights to family unification currently enjoyed by heterosexual binational couples (Human Rights Watch/Immigration Equality 2006, Luibhéid 2008). The heteronormative character of citizenship is made evident by the history of immigration policies aimed at the exclusion of “sexual deviants”—policies that likewise establish boundaries between “good” and “bad” sexual citizens (Luibhéid 2002, Coleman 2008, Canaday 2009).…”

“…It is mostly a new development, and still a relatively rare one, for the literature on migration to imagine immigrants as fully sexual beings (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994, Cruz and Manalansan 2002, González-López 2005), attend to how sexual identity historically has structured access to immigration (Luibhéid 2002, Coleman 2008, Luibhéid 2008, Canaday 2009), or consider how sexual aspirations might factor into motivations to embark on a new life in a new country (Parker 1999, pp. 179-221, Carrillo 2004, Luibhéid and Cantú 2005, Cantú 2009, Carrillo 2009).…”

“…Nor have immigration scholars had much to say about how sexuality affects migrants’ claims to belonging or practices of social incorporation upon arrival in their host countries (Herdt 1997, Manalansan 2003, González-López 2005, Manalansan 2006). 1 These absences are unfortunate given the increasingly discernible place of sexual rights within present-day immigration policies and politics worldwide—for example, in the growing appreciation across industrialized nations that persecution on the basis of sexuality may justify the granting of asylum (Cantú et al 2005, Randazzo 2005, Reddy 2005, Lidstone 2006, Carrillo 2010), or in debates over what sorts of committed relationships will count when pursuing the immigration policy goal of “family reunification” (Human Rights Watch/Immigration Equality 2006, Luibhéid 2008)…”

The Feeling of Migration : Narratives of Queer Intimacies and Partner Migration

“…This literature asks questions about who may or may not cross what national borders, for what reasons, and in relation to whom borders can or cannot be crossed. Again, the majority of this scholarship tends to focus on a (North) American context (Chávez 2010;Bailey 2004;Cantú 2009;Cantú et al 2005;Dueñas 2000;Epps 2005;Fairbairn 2005;Garland 2009;LaViolette 2004;Lorenz 2005;Luibhéid 1998Luibhéid , 2002Luibhéid , 2004Luibhéid , 2008Luibhéid & Cantú 2005;Miller 2005;Randazzo 2005;Reddy 2005;White 2010White , 2013aWhite , 2013bWhite , 2014.…”