‘My passport is just my way out of here’. Mixed-immigration status families, immigration enforcement and the citizenship implications

ABSTRACT

In a context of sustained political attempts to reduce immigration and increase expulsions from the UK, mixed-immigration status relationships between citizens and precarious foreign nationals have arisen as key sites where the boundaries of national belonging are contested. These families are presented as inherently problematic: complicating the citizen/migrant binary and supposedly pitting family life against national immigration objectives. Drawing on the accounts of British female partners of ‘deportable’ men, the article examines the impact of immigration enforcement on the lives and senses of security and membership of the citizens close to the migrants targeted. It argues that the women discovered longstanding gendered and classed barriers to operationalising their citizenship privileges, which led to reconfigurations of their relationships with their government and understandings of the institution of citizenship. Their accounts illustrate how immigration controls produce and discipline citizens, as well as migrants, exposing the internal hierarchies and conditionalities of citizenship.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• immigration
• class
• gender
• deportation
• family

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the co-authors of this special edition, Dr Saskia Bonjour and Prof. Betty de Hart, as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers at Social Identities for their helpful comments. Many thanks to the ESRC for generously funding this research and to Drs Candice Morgan-Glendinning and Karen Bell for their work on the project. My respect and gratitude also go to interviewees and countless others who informed the piece in various ways.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use ‘deportable’ to refer to non-citizens with irregular, limited or precarious immigration status in the UK, placing them at risk of enforced removal. The women’s British or EEA nationalities exempted them from immigration controls at the time of research, although the status of EU citizens has subsequently been thrown into question by Brexit.

2. E.g. extradition, citizen minors deported with non-citizen parents, re-entry bans of citizen terror suspects under the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015.

3. Just 10 denaturalisations occurred in 1949–2000 (on grounds relating to character, national security, disloyalty and fraud) (Gibney 2011, 16). The figure is now roughly 20 a year and is being used in growing numbers in response to Britons joining ISIS in Syria: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/318785/response/827666/attach/3/CCWD%20FOI%2038734%20Final%20Response.pdf.

4. e.g. the Primary Purpose Rule (1985–1997), which required foreign spouses to immigrate solely for relationship reasons and was aimed at differentiating between intra- and inter-ethnic marriages.

5. A legal definition of British nationality was only created in 1914 (British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act), in an attempt to unify the Empire (Baldwin 2001).

6. The British Nationality Act 1981 created four forms of subjecthood: Citizens of the UK and Colonies, Citizens of Independent Commonwealth Countries, Residual British subjects without citizenship, and Irish British.

7. Men make up 90% of those in immigration detention, or forcibly removed from the UK. Three quarters of immigration detainees are African or Asian (see Home Office Detention statistics 2016, Removals and Voluntary Departures statistics 2016).

8. For more on the research, see project website: http://www.bris.ac.uk/policybristol/policy-briefings/_mixed_immigration_families/.

9. In some cases the relocation was hoped to be temporary and within the EU, in order to access European legislation under the ‘Surinder Singh’ or Europe route.

10. They also stressed his ‘good migrant’ status through skills, education, languages and work, presented him as ‘belonging’ to the UK, and explained his forced unemployment and any criminal/immigration offending.

11. Other variables, particularly ethnicity, religion and criminal record, would almost certainly have arisen with different interviewees.

12. Greatest protectionism was reserved for supposedly ‘duped’ women, who were considered primarily British or Irish. Vulnerable but less sympathetic were those marrying for money, whom the registrars described as usually southern or eastern European women.

13. E.g. preferential visa categories and submission processes for the wealthy, extortionate application fees and the weakening of family and private life grounds for challenging deportation, in favour of the financially-informed concept of ‘integration’ (Griffiths 2017b).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/K009370/1].