Family-Based Immigration and Coercive Vulnerability: The Paradox of Support & Control

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 14. Drivers of migration

Abstract

The issue of immigration in the United States remains one of the most politically and socially contested topics of our time. As the primary destination for migrants worldwide, the U.S. faces some complex challenges in balancing humanitarian commitments, labor needs and security priorities. However, within this perspective, family-based immigration, long framed as a key part of U.S. immigration policy which has increasingly become a site of tension and debate (USCIS, 2023; American Immigration Council, 2021). Although designed to promote family unity, family sponsorship rules can also produce forms of legal and social dependency that expose immigrants, particularly women, to coercive control. Therefore, this paper examines "Does variation in immigrants’ family-based immigration conditions—(a) having close family members in the U.S. and (b) legal dependency on a family sponsor—increase or decrease their vulnerability to coercion?" On this issue, specifically, the question is important because family reunification policy can inscribe inequality in even, perhaps especially the most “humanitarian” framing. However, some immigrants arrive on work or asylum visas, and others rely on family sponsors who oversee their status and therefore access to jobs, schools and legal protection (Kandel 2018; USCIS 2023). So, family connections, usually considered to be social support can also be turned into agents of dominance through the weaponization of legal dependency (Menjívar & Abrego, 2012; Sweet, 2019). Nevertheless, this paradox is both significant and important for researchers and policymakers interested in the side effects of family-based immigration policies. And so family reunification makes up about two-thirds of those who enter the country legally each year to live permanently in the United States and most are women (AIC, 2021; Kandel, 2018). However, these patterns replicate status beliefs in institutional rule making, systems that appear impartial but that reproduce inequality (Ridgeway & Markus, 2022). Therefore, family sponsorship facilitates immigrant access to visas and enfolds many in relationships of dependence that might itself restrict freedom and expose men too, and women more, to coercion as well (Menjívar & Abrego, 2012; Sweet, 2019).

Author

• Vahid Jadidi, University of Notre Dame