The Family Migration Visa in the History of Marriage Restrictions: Postcolonial Relations and the UK Border

Abstract

This article:

• Provides a necessary critical reflection on the changes to the UK family migration visa 2012;
• Responds to the recent call made by Nick Vaughan-Williams and Victoria M. Basham in BJPIR for Critical Border Studies to better appreciate the interlocking elements of race, gender, class in border practices. It does this by also paying attention to sex;
• Challenges the presentism in the recent literature on border practices/immigration by situating the family migration visa in a broader history;
• Makes a strong contribution to the cross-over debates which are taking place in International Relations and governmentality literature regarding the postcolonial. It offers a Foucauldian analysis of government which takes colonial and postcolonial relations seriously.

This article explores the changes to the family migration visa (2012) through a history of postcolonial government. It explores how the visa shares a familiar function to previous forms of rule which targeted the household and family as a site of regulation. Under Empire, ‘marriage restrictions’ were used to manage the ‘intimate’ connections between coloniser and colonised. Over the course of the 20th century UK border regimes also targeted the intimate and the familial to regulate racial proximity. In tracing this history, I argue that the family migration visa works as a similar technique. The visa manages the intimate space of the couple, family and household through an ideal domesticity; in line with certain raced, gendered and class norms. It highlights how government techniques make claims over whom can live with, raise a family with, be intimate with whom in Britain.