Fictive Kinship: Family Reunification and the Meaning of Race and Nation in American Immigration

Chapter 6: Conclusion: “What Basis Do We Use to Decide Who Gets to Come?”

Chapter 6 Conclusion: “What Basis Do We Use to Decide Who Gets to Come?” In 2007, a year after hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their supporters demonstrated in Los Angeles and elsewhere to demand the liberalization of U.S. immigration laws, members of the Senate considered a proposal, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act (CIRA), to do just that. The bill had three critical features: a pathway to citizenship for the estimated 12 million unauthorized immigrants; a temporary worker visa program; and an overhaul of the preference program, which would have ended most of the existing family preference categories except for spouses and children of U.S. citizens. Instead of a family-based policy, the new legislation would have implemented a point-based or “merit” system in which applicants would have been evaluated for entry based on their education, job skills, and English proficiency in addition to family connections.1 As in previous debates on proposals to significantly alter the family reunification provisions, senators objected. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) argued that the proposed reform to legal immigration was a “radical shift away from reunification . That solution is not consistent with the core values of this Nation . In the past, our immigration laws have acknowledged that our country and our communities are stronger when families are united.”2 If limiting the family preference system was not the right solution to the immigration problem, what kind of reform did it warrant? Lawmakers had to answer a fundamental question. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) asked: “If we can’t accept everybody, what basis do we use to decide who gets to come?”3 As the previous chapter and the debates over CIRA show, this question raises competing demands between family unity and economic interests. That is a rather simple characterization of the policy choices or goals. Nevertheless, in working toward immigration reform, lawmakers and other stakeholders must consider whether these goals are equivalent, operate in tandem symbiotically, or in opposition to one another. In Senate judiciary hearings on immigration reform, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) presented these concerns and offered a narrative that he hoped would reconcile the two policy objectives as compatible. Offering support for CONCLUSION 121 legislation that would reduce wait time for families wishing to reunite and would provide a pathway to legal status for unauthorized immigrants , he pushed for reform and stated, “Changes to our family-based immigration policies are not just the right thing to do for moral reasons; they would also be good for the economy.”4 However, the more foundational issue—the one this book has sought to address—requires an answer to the question of what we imagine the nation to be. As immigrants alter, challenge, or affirm an existing identity, immigration policy is about regulating their settlement in order to preserve or fashion a new national identity. This book has shown that the meaning of family and the role of family reunification have been central to these efforts. Family reunification has been part of what I call family ideation—the conceptualization of what family means, constitutes, and features in terms of its idealized characteristics, such as gender or sexual norms, class ideals, and racial or ethnic characteristics. Family has provided immigration stakeholders with a narrative structure for talking about immigrants’ assimilability and the meanings of race and nation, enabling them to claim which immigrants are “like one of the family” and can be incorporated into the “American family.” Exploring family this way, I explained that family reunification provisions existed in American immigration policy long before politicians and immigration scholars celebrated family reunification as a modern political achievement. Regardless of the diversity of arrangements and actual lived experiences of individual families, the narrative structure or framework of family has offered immigration stakeholders a way to make sense of the unfamiliar , to talk about related concepts of race and nation, and to shape policy development. The structure includes a story line about family members, their roles and functions, and family’s purpose. Immigration stakeholders’ discursive action around family helped to generate unexpected family support for otherwise excludable immigrant groups (chapter 3) as well as restrictions against immigrant families during a time of immigration expansion (chapter 5). Family narrative is malleable; the particular details of the narrative are diverse and open to varying interpretations . Different groups at different times, for example, can be thought of as meritorious or deserving of family unity (chapter 4). In addition, this narrative structure offers a language for articulating the meaning...