Effects of Illegality on Immigrant Families: What the Relationships of Legal Status-Discordant Siblings Reveal

• In Event: 2266 - Family Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 13. Immigrant Families and Relationships

Abstract

The “illegality” of some family members influences opportunities, limitations, and resources for everyone in a household. While most scholarship on immigrant families has been concerned with intergenerational dynamics, sibling relationships have the potential to reveal so much more about the effect of legal status precisely because they are peers in the same household: there are no generational differences, and the environment in which they are raised in the same. This paper draws on the experiences of 100 mixed-status families, based on five years of ethnographic study in a US–Mexico border county where an estimated 11.7 percent of the general population is undocumented. The study relied on a unique approach: rather than interviewing one person from each family, it sought greater depth by focusing on multiple members of the same family in order to produce novel empirical and theoretical insights. Findings illustrate that jealousy and resentment is frequently experienced between siblings with different statuses. On the flip side, U.S. citizen siblings may feel guilty for having more opportunities and resources than others in the family. Stratification by legal status also often leads to a stratification of social and everyday responsibilities, such as driving, sharing college financial aid, or expectations to provide more internal remittances than others. Undocumented siblings must watch as their citizen brothers and sisters get better health care than they do. While many gladly assist others, sharing is not always a benign or altruistic activity, and strongly impacts power dynamics in the family. In recent years, mixed-status families have become “collateral damage” and a better understanding of these effects is needed to help redirect contemporary debates that assume anti-immigrant policies only affect the undocumented. This paper, grounded in the tradition of a scholar-activist sociology, concludes that political efforts toward reform must take into account the experiences of mixed-status families, now a primary and enduring feature of the contemporary immigrant experience in the United States.

Author

• Heide Castaneda, University of South Florida