Migration and Adaptation: Legal Immigrants with Undocumented Spouses

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Abstract

This paper is a chapter from a book project entitled Migration and Adaptation: Legal Immigrants with Undocumented Spouses (Routledge, expected publication December 2019) about the adaptation experiences of American legal immigrants with undocumented spouses. Having an undocumented spouse hinders immigrants` adaptation process and presents unique challenges that have not been previously studied. These challenges exist in all areas of legal immigrants` life (e.g., private life, social life, professional life, finances, and health). This paper focuses on personal challenges experienced by legal immigrants with undocumented spouses. I argue that seemingly private problems reflect a whole range of public issues that are caused primarily by existing federal and state policies targeting undocumented spouses of legal immigrants. Through their contact with undocumented spouses, legal immigrants are subjected to the same intrusive and punitive laws as their spouses. This is a major social problem that has not been recognized and studied. In addition to addressing an under-researched area, the study is also methodologically unique. It is the first sociological study to uncover detailed and innermost nuances from the lives of legal immigrants with undocumented spouses. By extending an autoethnographic lens as the primary methodological strategy, narratives from the lives of legal immigrants with undocumented spouses is highlighted. The narratives are the object of analysis which encompass fourteen years of rich, complex experiences of the author who is a U.S. permanent resident married to an undocumented immigrant. Life stories from the author`s lens are enhanced by traditional qualitative in-depth interviews with other immigrants and recent quantitative data. This unique multi-level analysis provides a timely account of immigrant experiences with implications for existing policies concerning the adaptation process of American legal immigrants with undocumented spouses.

Author

• Nina Michalikova, University of Central Oklahoma