Unauthorized Love: Mixed-Citizenship Couples Negotiating Intimacy, Immigration, and the State by Jane Lilly López

Abstract

Unauthorized Love centers relationships between U.S. citizens and U.S. noncitizens to document the reach of U.S. immigration law into the lives of mixed-citizenship families. Through an analysis of 56 ethnographic interviews with mixed-citizenship families, López examines interactions between families and the U.S. administrative state, family decision-making processes, and family reunification outcomes and consequences. Unauthorized Love demonstrates that governmental rejection and family separation is a central feature of U.S. immigration policy, with serious consequences for family-level integration in the United States. Chapter 1 introduces readers to mixed-citizenship couples by recounting their love stories and foreshadows the disparate paths families will navigate. While marriage is a mechanism available to U.S. citizens to extend citizenship rights to their spouses, immigrant applicants and their sponsors are not treated equally under the law. Chapter 2 provides a visual to demonstrate how the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), the 1986 Immigration Marriage Fraud Amendments (IMFA), and the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) work collectively to systematically favor higher-class, more highly educated, and better-resourced immigrant applicants and citizen sponsors.