“Impossible Families”: Mixed‐Citizenship Status Couples and the Law

• Published date: 01 January 2015
• Date: 01 January 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lapo.12032
• Author: Jane Lilly López

“Impossible Families”: Mixed-Citizenship

Status Couples and the Law

JANE LILLY LÓPEZ

This article explores the complex and contradictory relationship between citizen-

ship in the law and the immigrant reality of mixed-citizenship family life through

in-depth interviews with individuals in mixed-citizenship marriages. An examina-

tion of mixed-citizenship marriage exposes the inadequacies of approaching citi-

zenship as an individual-centered concept. The data indicate that, though both

immigration and citizenship laws focus on the individual, the repercussions of

those laws have family-level effects. Because of their spouses’ immigrant status,

many citizens are obliged by the law to live the immigrant experience in their own

country or to become immigrants themselves.

For Camille, falling in love was the easy part. She and Giovanni clicked right

away: they both loved art and movies and spent most of their time together

making each other laugh. Before they married, Camille was aware that

Giovanni was undocumented, but he had been living undocumented in the

United States since he was six years old and he had never had any problems,

so she did not worry much about it. Besides, she was an American citizen

and, as far as she knew, that should be enough to help Giovanni get legal

status once they married:

You have these ideas that, well, you’re in love and of course things will work

out perfectly and everything will just fall into place exactly the way you want it

to. So, I honestly did not think at all that we would ever have any trouble with

citizenship or anything like that. I thought we had it all figured out, even

though we weren’t doing anything necessarily. We didn’t have a lawyer or

anything like that, but everyone I had talked to before I got married was like,

This project was supported in part by a 2012 Summer Research Grant from the UCSD Depart-

ment of Sociology. I would like to thank the many UCSD faculty members and graduate

students who helped me in every stage of this project, from research design to publication. I offer

special thanks to Kwai Ng for never tiring of reading another draft and providing me with the

guidance and enthusiasm to see this project through to the end. I am especially grateful to the

individuals and couples who participated in this project and so willingly shared their personal

experiences and struggles with me. Thank you for trusting me with your stories.

Address correspondence to Jane Lilly López, University of California, San Diego—Sociology,

401 Social Sciences Building, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093-0533, USA. E-mail:

jrlilly@ucsd.edu.

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LAW & POLICY, Vol. 37, Nos 1–2, January–April 2015 ISSN 0265–8240

© 2015 The Author

Law & Policy © 2015 The University of Denver/Colorado Seminary

doi: 10.1111/lapo.12032

“Oh yeah, you get married to an American citizen and they just become a

citizen.” It’s not until after they get deported that you start hearing all the

[other] stories.

Seven months after they were married, Giovanni was arrested after being

pulled over for speeding; despite Camille’s best efforts to appeal on Giovan-

ni’s behalf, he was deported shortly thereafter. Camille and her children

have since moved to Guatemala, where Giovanni now lives, in order to be

together as a family. When her friends ask why they decided to move to

Guatemala and Camille explains that Giovanni was deported, her friends

are incredulous:

They’ve been shocked. Every single person who has heard: their eyes get big,

their mouths drop open. They’re absolutely shocked. [. . .] When I say

deported, they all look at me funny and say, “But you’re American. Shouldn’t

he have just been switched over?” So it’s a common misconception that every-

body has, that it’s just fine and fancy free for these noncitizens to become

citizens if they marry a US citizen.

Though thousands of Americans like Camille know that this is not the case,

current scholarship on citizenship and the assumptions behind recent immi-

gration laws are based on the premise that citizens’ relationships with both

society and the state are not impacted by their relationships with immi-

grants. Based on interviews with twenty-two US citizens married to non-

citizens, the findings presented here tell a very different story. The data

indicate that, although both immigration and citizenship laws are directed

toward the individual—despite often explicit links to family members—the

repercussions of those laws have family-level effects. While categories like

“immigrant” and “citizen” may facilitate the separation of certain groups of

people in discourse and policy, such categories do not reflect a similar sepa-

ration of those groups in American social life. Mixed-citizenship families

embody the intimate intermingling of these different groups in everyday life

and reinforce the relevance of family and other formal social relationships

in an increasingly individuated society. In general, the findings reveal that

the immigrant experience is not a phenomenon lived by immigrants alone.

Though assimilation is “expected to be a one-way process that would also

be natural and evolutionary” (Pedraza 2006, 41), the data presented here

suggest that immigrant integration into society includes movement on the

part of both immigrants and citizens, and that the law, instead of bringing

immigrants up to the level of citizens, often pushes citizens into immigrant

roles.

FAMILY, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE LAW

Classical scholarship on assimilation identifies “intermarriage” as an impor-

tant “step” in the assimilatory process (Gordon 1964; Park and Burgess

94 LAW & POLICY January–April 2015

© 2015 The Author

Law & Policy © 2015 The University of Denver/Colorado Seminary