Divided Families and Divided Nations: Reexamining Cross-national Differences in the Politics and Regulation of Family Reunification

• In Event: 549 - Section on International Migration Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 18. Immigration Policies and Practices

Abstract

Ever since New Commonwealth citizens began activating their right of settlement in the UK in the mid-twentieth century, family-related immigration has been a point of political anxiety. As recently as July 2012, this was evident in draconian legislation effectively barring 48% of UK citizens from sponsoring non-European family members’ settlement - a policy targeting Britons of South Asian descent. Similarly, it was the specter of non-white “dependents” and families joining New Commonwealth migrant workers which sounded the death-knell of empire citizenship between 1962 and 1981. Then, as now, legislators sought to construct a racialized boundary between those with the unconditional right to form families in the UK (Old Commonwealth citizens and wealthy, white British males) and those without such rights.
Unlike the UK, in 1965 the U.S. made family reunification the center of its immigration system in the landmark Hart-Celler Act. Today, family-preference immigration constitutes over two-thirds of all new U.S. residents, with non-European immigration forecasted to drive 88% of population growth over the next 50 years. But why did the UK respond to the “challenges” of immigration reform by restricting family migration, while the U.S. made family reunification the centerpiece of its immigration system? I explore this question through primary analysis of government publications and debates surrounding key immigration reforms during the 1960s. I argue that this moment of divergence was due to the context-specific ways in which immigrant families were racialized and the role these racialized families were seen to have in the reproduction of the nation.

Author

• Jake Watson, Boston University