Unauthorized Love: Mixed-Citizenship Couples Negotiating Intimacy, Immigration, and the State

In Unauthorized Love: Mixed-Citizenship Couples Negotiating Intimacy, Immigration, and the State, Jane Lilly López addresses the experience of navigating ‘‘family reunification’’—the legal process through which U.S. citizens can petition for their noncitizen spouses to obtain legal immigrant status. The central focus of the book is how couples with different legal positioning visà-vis the immigration system experience the family reunification process. Most of the book uses qualitative interview data to describe how the mixed-status families in López’s study navigate the family reunification process, and how the process shapes family life. In Chapter Three, López’s descriptive analysis focuses on agency and constraints to agency, showing that even the most strategic approach can result in an unfavorable outcome for families positioned disadvantageously vis-à-vis the immigration system. Faring especially poorly in the process are those of lower socio-economic status, and those with preexisting immigration enforcement histories (e.g., previous unauthorized border crossings and deportations). Chapter Four shows that mixed-citizenship families face restricted spatial mobility within the U.S. and transnationally. This restricted mobility inhibits the family’s ability to fully engage in family life. For example, a U.S. citizen spouse and their children wishing to live together as a family with a noncitizen spouse may be compelled to live outside the United States when the noncitizen is denied legal status or while awaiting a decision on a family reunification application. Contrary to the assertion by the Supreme Court in Kerry v. Din that U.S. citizen family members can simply ‘‘visit’’ noncitizen members denied legal immigrant status, López’s interviewees show that the family reunification process forces a choice between country and family. As one of López’s interviewees pointed out, ‘‘being able to live together ‘somewhere’ was not the same as being able to live together in their country of choice’’ (p. 84). The unauthorized families López interviewed report feeling ‘‘trapped.’’ But the borders that confine their movements are invisible to anyone not initiated into the world of unauthorized life. Unauthorized families avoid travel outside of the city or state where they live. International travel and travel by plane are also off limits. They must also avoid areas unsafe for noncitizens (i.e., international border regions); and, as most of López’s unauthorized interviewees are of Mexican or Central American origin, they may also feel compelled to avoid predominantly white areas (where people of color face increased racialized visibility and surveillance). Ultimately, these forms of ‘‘spatial disintegration’’ result in the erasure of noncitizen family members from family life, both on a daily basis and over the long term. The experiences of ‘‘authorized families’’ (those who successfully pursue legal status through family reunification), especially those of economic means, diverge starkly from those of the unauthorized families in López’s research. Legal status for both spouses grants the ability to ‘‘be able to be in the country of our choosing together at the same time,’’ (p. 102) and these families are able to enjoy the benefits of dual-membership and transnational life in two countries. Chapter Five describes the barriers to unauthorized families’ structural integration in the realms of education, access to economic resources, and access to key bureaucracies. Lack of access to the higher wages and benefits associated with the legal labor market, as well as lack of access to credit and social welfare programs, are forms of formal exclusion that present significant challenges for unauthorized families, and which often have implications for the family reunification process itself. One couple described in the book, Ramses and Angelica, for instance, depended entirely on Ramses’s (an unauthorized immigrant) income to support their family. Angelica chose not to work in order to reduce their family’s tax burden; Ramses’s 456 Reviews