Regulating Mixed Marriages through Acquisition and Loss of Citizenship

• Author: Betty de Hart
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716215595390
• Published date: 01 November 2015
• Date: 01 November 2015
• Subject Matter: Section II: Intermarriage and Dimensions of Integration

170 ANNALS, AAPSS, 662, November 2015

DOI: 10.1177/0002716215595390

Regulating

Mixed

Marriages

through

Acquisition and

Loss of

Citizenship

By

BETTY DE HART

595390ANN The Annals of the American AcademyRegulating Mixed Marriages Through Citizenship

research-article2015

Mixed marriages have always had an ambiguous and

often problematic relationship with the law. On one

hand, mixed marriages have been seen as a key indica-

tor of sociocultural integration into mainstream society.

In terms of the law, this perception has been expressed,

for example, as privileged access to citizenship status

for immigrant family members of citizens. On the other

hand, mixed marriages have been seen as a threat to

society and social cohesion. In this article, I argue that

these contradictory perceptions of mixed relationships

have informed the development of citizenship law over

time. Building on literature on the regulation of mixed

marriages in law, as well as gender and citizenship law,

I use the Netherlands as a case study to demonstrate

how citizenship law has been used as a tool to prevent

certain types of “undesirable” mixed couples and how

this approach has informed Dutch citizenship law until

today.

Keywords: mixed marriages; citizenship law; race;

gender; intersectionality

Mixed Marriages and the Law: An

Ambiguous Relationship

Mixed marriages have always had an ambigu-

ous and often problematic relationship with the

law. On one hand, mixed marriages have been

seen as a key indicator of sociocultural integra-

tion into mainstream society. Mixed relation-

ships are considered a sign that differences

between groups have become smaller and eas-

ier to bridge. As mixed relationships become

more frequent, they come to be seen as “nor-

mal” (Merton 1941/1976). Mixed marriages

have also been seen as an indicator of

Betty de Hart is a professor of migration law at the

Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance

(ACELG), University of Amsterdam, and an associate

professor at the Centre for Migration Law, Radboud

University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She has pub-

lished on transnational and mixed families in migration,

citizenship, and family law.

REGULATING MIXED MARRIAGES THROUGH CITIZENSHIP 171

increasing contact between different groups, which enhances the chances of

meeting each other and, consequently, the chances of marrying each other

(Allport 1954; Pettigrew 1971). Because mixed relationships are the result of

integration, mixed marriages can be regarded a facilitator of integration; here,

the assumption is that migrants who marry outside their own group integrate into

mainstream society more easily (Sterckx 2014). In law, these notions of mixed

marriages as a result of integration or an integrative force were often translated

into privileged access to residence and citizenship status for family members of

citizens.

On the other hand, historically, mixed marriages and relationships have frequently

been perceived as a threat to society and social cohesion, as they crossed racial or

ethnic and national borders that were intensively guarded by the state. This is why

the state was inclined to interfere with mixed relationships, introducing legal meas-

ures to prevent them. In the Anglo-American literature, so-called anti-miscegenation

laws aimed at preventing mixed marriages and relationships (or sex) have been stud-

ied extensively. The American prohibitions of interracial sex and marriage, which

remained on the books until 1967 and which the United States Supreme Court held

to be unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia,1 received ample scholarly attention

(Hodes 1997; Kennedy 2003; Moran 2001; Onwuachi-Willig 2013; Pascoe 2009).

In the literature on Europe, attention to regulations preventing mixed mar-

riages has remained much more limited. The common understanding is that

Europe never had interracial marriage prohibitions, with the notable exceptions

of the Nazi laws prohibiting sex and marriage between Jews and non-Jews

(Stuldreher 2007; Bukey 2011; Szobar 2002) and interracial marriage prohibi-

tions in Europe’s colonies (Everts 1998; Neus 2007; Stoler 2001).2

However, interracial marriage prohibitions were not typically American. It is

important to point out that in Europe, the Nazi laws were also applied outside of

Germany, including in the Netherlands, even before Nazi occupation in 1940

(Caestecker and Fraser 2008). Already when the Nuremberg racial laws were

introduced in 1933, Dutch civil registrars wondered whether they could marry a

mixed Jewish-gentile couple in case German law applied and sometimes refused

such marriages (De Hart 2014). Furthermore, not all marriage prohibitions in

Europe came from the Nazis. In France, interracial marriage prohibitions

applied at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century

(Heuer 2009). During the French occupation of the Netherlands (1810–1815),

these prohibitions also applied on Dutch territory (Hondius 2014, 227).

However, to look only at prohibitions of mixed marriages is insufficient to gain

a full grasp of how mixed marriages have been regulated in the law. Countries

that did not prohibit mixed marriages often chose other measures to discourage

and prevent them. Debra Thompson has convincingly argued that “anti-miscege-

nation laws” should be understood in a broader sense, including other forms of

regulations and policies aimed at preventing or restricting mixed relationships

(Thompson 2009). She demonstrates how the modern state had changed and was

less inclined to prohibit and more willing to regulate, facilitate, and produce.

Hence, in spite of a shift from prohibitions to other forms of regulation, official

opinions continued to disapprove of and discourage mixed marriages and