Thursday April 21, 2022, 15:30-17:00, Agora 1, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
A “mixed-status family” is a family whose members include people with different citizenship or immigration statuses. Although policy categories and discourses construct separate categories of migrants and citizens this does not necessarily reflect social reality. The number of mixed-status families is growing in both the American and the European context. There is increasing scholarly attention to the family-level effects of the disadvantaged residence status of one of its members. The border runs directly through these families. Both the inclusive and the exclusive side of citizenship are present within mixed-status families: citizen family members may be confronted with exclusion through migration policies affecting their ability to establish family life in their country of citizenship. On the other hand, non-citizen family members may experience inclusion through their family relationship with a citizen with privileged access to residence, naturalisation, employment, education, or social security as family members of citizens. Migration law may keep families apart across borders through restrictive family migration and deportation policies but also effect their opportunities of social integration and their economic welfare to a large extent. In this seminar we explore the family-level effects of mixed-status families in different national contexts: the US and the UK in relation to deportation and disintegration.
Program
15:30 Welcome, Thomas Spijkerboer
15.35-15:55 Melanie Griffiths, Deportability and mixed-citizenship couples in the UK
15:55-16:15 Jane Lopez, Unauthorized Love: Mixed-Citizenship Couples Negotiating Intimacy, Immigration, and the State
16:15-16:30 Break
16:30-16:45 Respondent: Betty de Hart
16:45-17:00 Discussion
Thursday April 21, 2022, 15:30-17:00
Venue: Agora 1, Main Building, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Please register via secretariaat.sb.rch@vu.nl
Speakers:
Melanie Griffiths
Dr Griffiths has been a Birmingham Fellow since February 2018. Based at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, she is leading research on new developments in immigration enforcement. Between 2014-17, she was PI of an ESRC Future Research Leaders grant at the University of Bristol, working on the family lives and Article 8 rights of ‘mixed-immigration status’ families and men at risk of deportation. In 2013, Dr Griffiths was an Associate Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, working with Dr Nick Gill on an ESRC-funded project looking at asylum appeals. Her DPhil research was conducted at the University of Oxford, on the British asylum system, with a particular focus on refused asylum seekers and immigration detainees. It considered the role and negotiation of identification requirements in the asylum system. Dr Griffiths also writes on time, uncertainty, masculinity and bureaucratic relations in the migration field.
Jane Lilly López
Jane Lilly López is an assistant professor of Sociology at Brigham Young University. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, San Diego in 2018. Her research interests include citizenship (as both a legal status and a lived experience/identity), immigration, integration, and the effects of law in the public and private realms of everyday life. Her book, Unauthorized Love: Mixed-Citizenship Couples Negotiating Intimacy, Immigration, and the State (Stanford University Press, 2022), examines the intersections of immigration, citizenship, and family in the law and in everyday life. (Author interview about Unauthorized Love on the New Books Network.)
Betty de Hart
Betty de Hart is a professor of transnational families and migration law at Vrije Universiteit. She conducts legal, empirical and historical research on the national, European and international rules that transnational families encounter, the views behind these rules as well as the impact on the everyday lives of transnational families. Such research will provide new insights into the meaning of nationality, citizenship and belonging.
This seminar is organized by the Amsterdam Centre for Migration and Refugee Law