Immigration Article of the Day: Love Triangle: Nation, Spouse, Citizen by Audrey Macklin
Love Triangle: Nation, Spouse, Citizen by Audrey Macklin, Anne-Marie D’Aoust, ed. The Politics of Marriage and Gender: Global Issues in Local Contexts (Rutgers: Rutgers University Press)
Abstract
Popular discourse and political theory celebrate the bond between family and state: the state supports families; the state depends on families; the state loves families. In the language of Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted and endorsed by states, “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.” (United Nations 1948). The family is represented as primordial, prepolitical, and foundational. Politicians, academics, and judges alike reach for family when seeking a metaphor for the nation, when claiming authority as parens patriae over children, or in appeals to the mother/father/homeland. But for some of the same reasons that the family is an attractive metaphor for the state, the family is also a potential rival for the citizen’s affection and devotion. In this sense, the state’s love of family is mixed with envy. The citizen’s love of a foreigner—entwining kinship and otherness—competes with love of nation. This short chapter (written as epilogue) explores the rivalrous dimension of the state-family bond through the vehicle of marriage/intimate partner migration practices of states. It asks what is being regulated, who regulates and is regulated, and how they are regulated. It concludes with a provocative claim: States’ campaigns to restrict and reduce kinship migration (here ‘marriage migration’) partakes of a eugenicist impulse to people the nation with those considered most fit and desirable. Anti-miscegenation laws, forcible sterilisation, or compelled reproduction have long been repudiated. The state does not get to choose who enters the polity through the birth canal. The state does, however, arrogate power to dictate whether kin can enter the polity through immigration. The difference between citizens and noncitizen lies less in the state’s preferences regarding who is a fit and desirable member of the polity than in perceptions of the legitimacy of using coercion to advance those preferences within the polity versus at its border. I call this the project of immigration eugenics.
KJ