Navigating legality: transnational mixed-status families and the U.S. family-based immigration system

ABSTRACT

As ‘legal’ immigrants, Mexicans with U.S. lawful permanent resident status have the rare opportunity to petition for immigrant visas for certain eligible family members. This article draws on multi-sited ethnographic research carried out over six years in Guanajuato, Mexico and Connecticut, United States, to examine the experiences of transnational mixed-status families with access to the U.S family-based immigration system. For some families, legalisation is perceived as a crucial resource. For others, legalisation poses a threat to family and community ties. Legalisation is not an inevitable or natural outcome of access to the family-based immigration system. Rather, it entails a complex process of negotiation among family members with different degrees of influence, and divergent and shifting goals. Families often find that engagements with the family immigration system yield unintended repercussions for children’s social mobility. Legalisation decisions have temporal dimensions, as intimate family decisions must be made according to a timeline imposed by U.S. immigration law. This transnational approach to mixed-status family experiences reveals that legality is a status worthy of study in its own right, and that legal statuses – while they may not be enforceable beyond the borders of the state that creates them – have power that shapes transnational family life.

KEYWORDS:

• Legality
• transnational families
• mixed-status families
• Mexico-U.S
• immigration law

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by several grants, including a Predoctoral Research Award and a Tinker Foundation Field Research Grant administered by UConn’s Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies, two Summer Research Fellowships and a Dissertation Completion Grant from UConn’s Department of Anthropology, and a Dissertation Completion Grant from UConn Graduate School. Previous versions of this article were presented at the American Anthropological Association 2018 Annual Meeting and the Emerging Immigration Scholars Conference at the UCLA Center for the Study of International Migration (CSIM) in 2019. Thank you to Caroline Brettell, Samuel Martinez, Susan Coutin, Merrill Singer, and Mark Overmyer-Velazquez for your comments during the writing and revision process, and thank you to participants in the CSIM Emerging Scholars conference, especially Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, for your helpful feedback. I also want to thank the research participants who remain anonymous for reasons of confidentiality, without whom this work would have been impossible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All names of research participants are pseudonyms.

2 H-2A visas are temporary guestworker visas that facilitate migration of seasonal agricultural workers (Hernández-León 2020).

3 Río Seco is a pseudonym.

4 DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama-era programme which provides temporary relief from deportation for certain undocumented immigrant youth (Gonzales, Terriquez, and Ruszczyk 2014).

5 An important exception to the dominant trend of U.S.-based methodology in research with mixed-status families is a 2015 article by Medina and Menjívar, which examines how the U.S. legal status of deportees shapes their incorporation upon return to Mexico (Medina and Menjívar 2015).

6 Unless otherwise noted, the history recounted here is derived from my interviews with Río Secans with extensive knowledge of the history of migration from Río Seco to the United States.

7 The Bracero Programme was a binational labour agreement in place from 1942–1964 that recruited single male Mexican workers to work on U.S. farms during the World War II labour shortage (Snodgrass 2011).

8 Immigrants who received LPR status through SAW initially received a provisional green card, but ultimately were granted full LPR status (Kerwin 2010). They are now legally indistinguishable from the rest of the LPR population despite having a history of unauthorised entry.

9 Eligibility is limited by family relationship, age, and marital status. Family members of LPRs and U.S. citizens can only be awarded green cards after a time-consuming and costly petition process (US State Department n.d.-a). In practice, petitioners may spend years saving money and gathering and processing paperwork in order to pursue green cards for their family members. The number of family petitions processed each year is restricted by numerical quotas. Since IRCA, the demand for immigrant visas has increased dramatically. In turn, these numerical limitations have produced backlogs in the family-based immigration system, as long as 20 or more years for their applications to be processed. As of November 2017, there were over 3.6 million family-based visa applicants awaiting processing, a third of which (1.2 million) are from Mexican nationals.

10 In all cases, the petitioner must be 21 years or older (US State Department n.d.-a).

11 This work is part of a larger project examining the transnational employment network linking Río Secans to the agricultural industry in central Connecticut, for which I conducted participant observation on farms as well as interviews with white/Anglo farmers and farm employees and representatives of local government and service organisations.

12 Two research participants were naturalised U.S citizens. One had naturalised prior to the research, and the other naturalised between the initial and follow-up research periods. A third had attempted to naturalise but failed the English language portion of the citizenship test.

13 Due to the fluid nature of immigration statuses in this community, I did not collect data regarding the specific percentages of Río Seco’s population with different kinds of legal status. The descriptions here are observations gleaned from my long-term involvement with the community since 2013, which I describe in more detail below.

14 Many Río Secans descend from Bracero workers, and largely continued the solo male “sojourner” mobility pattern characteristic of most Mexican migrants prior to the Special Agricultural Workers Program. Whereas applicants to IRCA’s general legalisation programme had to prove long-term residence and community ties, SAW applicants only had to demonstrate evidence of three months of employment in U.S. agriculture.

15 Julio was another Río Secan who had opted to pursue family legalisation a few years earlier.

16 Written in the original Spanish to preserve the original meaning (there is no exact English translation for this usage).

17 I have not learned of any cases where a Río Secan’s green card status was revoked due to failure to meet the residency requirement, but several interviewees shared similar stories of harassment at the border.

18 I address the relationship between legality and intergenerational mobility at length elsewhere (Cook Forthcoming).