Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant

310 Pages·2013·7.25 MB·English

by  Eithne Luibhéid

PREGNANT ON ARRIVAL
Diff erence Incorporated
Roderick A. Ferguson and Grace Kyungwon Hong
series editors
Pregnant on Arrival
. . . .
Making the Illegal Immigrant
Eithne Luibhéid
Diff erence Incorporated
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Portions of chapter 1 are reprinted from “Childbearing against the State? Asylum Seeker
Women in the Irish Republic,” Women’s Studies International Forum (special issue on “Rep-
resenting Migrant Women in Ireland and the E.U.”) 27, no. 4 (October– November 2004):
335–5 0. Reprinted with permission from Elsevier.
An earlier version of chapter 4 was previously published as “Sexual Regimes and Migration
Controls: Reproducing the Irish Nation- State in Transnational Contexts,” Feminist Review
(special issue on “Sexual Moralities”), no. 83 (Summer 2006): 60– 78. Reprinted with per-
mission of Palgrave Macmillan.
Portions of the Introduction, chapter 5, and the Conclusion w ere previously published as
“Nationalist Heterosexuality, Migrant (Il)legality, and Irish Citizenship Law: Queering the
Connections,” in South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 1: 179–2 04. Copyright 2011 Duke Univer-
sity Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Duke University Press.
Copyright 2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitt ed, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy-
ing, recording, or otherwise, without the prior writt en permission of the publisher.
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20 19 1 8 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
A Note on Terminology vii
Introduction 1
1. Shift ing Boundaries through Discourses of Childbearing 31
2. Counternarratives of Migration Law and Childbearing 55
3. Baby Gives Birth to Parents: Direct Provision and
Subject Formation 87
4. Th e “Right to Life of the Unborn” and Migration Controls 125
5. Reproductive Futurism and the Temporality of
Migration Control 149
6. From Childbearing to Multiple Sexuality and
Migration Struggles 175
Conclusion 191
Ac know ledg ments 211
Notes 215
Index 289
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A Note on Terminology
When discussing migrants who are variously characterized as illegal,
irregular, unauthorized, undocumented, nonstatus, clandestine, sans
papières, sin papeles, and so on, word choices are never neutral. Rather, they
refl ect specifi c histories and pol iti cal perspectives in a deeply polarized
debate. Moreover, debates about terminology are inseparable from ques-
tions about how we conceptualize the subjects, objects, and pro cesses of
analysis.
In this book I generally use the term “illegal migrant.” Many who are
critical of migration policy strongly object to the term, arguing that
while individuals may be in irregular situations, no human being is ever
illegal. Moreover, the term att ributes criminality to migrants who, in the
vast majority of instances, have committ ed no crime, and it fails to shed
meaningful light on their actual circumstances. Ruhs and Anderson
argue for moving away from a binary of legal/illegal (or regular/irregu-
lar, or authorized/unauthorized) to instead explore how migrants’ com-
pliance with diff erent aspects of law falls along a varied spectrum.1
Goldring, Berinstein, and Bernhard propose the concept of “precarious
status” as a means to capture “varied forms of irregularity [and the ways
that] there may be movement among various forms of irregularity, and
between these and legality.”2 I agree with these arguments, and the ma-
terials that follow contribute to advancing them. Yet, as Anderson and
Ruhs explain, “states . . . typically use the term ‘illegal.’ Th ey tend to
present ‘illegality’ as a problem to be solved through stronger borders
(internal and external), strict enforcement of immigration and residence
controls, and, increasingly, cooperation between the state and civil soci-
ety.”3 Moreover, “ ‘illegality’ is also the term that is oft en used by those
elements of the mass media that promote and reinforce negative public
att itudes to immigration, and illegal immigration in par tic u lar.” 4 In this
book I retain the term “illegal migrant” because I seek to critically histo-
ricize, problematize, and denaturalize how states, media, and publics
· vii ·
viii A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY
have participated in constructing the fi gure of the “illegal” migrant as
a problem to be solved within the logics that Anderson and Ruhs
describe— and the role of sexualities in these proc esses.
I generally use the term “migrant” to refer to anyone in Ireland who
does not hold Irish citizenship status and is therefore subject to the state’s
immigration control apparatus. Th e Irish state diff erentiates among mi-
grants by assigning them statuses including employment permit holder,
student, immigrant investor, spouse or civil partner of an Irish national,
asylum seeker, and so on, to which diff erential rights and constraints
att ach. Whether the migrant is from the Eur op ea n U nion/Eur op ea n
Economic Area (EU/EEA), a visa- required non- EU/EEA country, or a
non-v isa-r equired non- EU/EEA country further signifi cantly shapes the
migrant’s possibilities and constraints. For children who are born in Ire-
land but without Irish citizenship, their parents’ country of citizenship
and legal status is generally determinative of their status.5 Rather than
uncritically reproducing these state- based distinctions, I make such dis-
tinctions primarily when speaking factually about how a migrant has
been offi cially categorized; critiquing such distinctions; or addressing
how migrants try to transition among the statuses. I use the word “im-
migrant” to refer to offi cial state laws, policies, and control mea sures that
are directed toward migrants.
Introduction
Justice offi cials [in Ireland] reported late last year that some
80 percent of women of child- bearing age who sought asylum in the
previous 12 months were visibly pregnant when they lodged their
applications. It is a safe bet that many of these people would drop
their asylum claims once they had become mothers, and instead
claim residency.
And so it came to pass that being visibly an immigrant and
visibly pregnant— or even in charge of a baby in a buggy— was
enough to provoke hostile reactions from passers- by who perceived
this as evidence of “circumventing” normal immigration controls.
Alert to the fact that what has become known as the “Irish born
child” route to residency was increasingly being used by people who
did not otherwise have a claim to live here as refugees, the
authorities had long since resolved to do something about it.
—Nuala Haughey, “Residents of Limbo,” Irish Times
I
n the 1990s, Ireland became transformed from a nation drained by
centuries of emigration into what U.S. investment fi rm Morgan Stan-
ley dubbed the “Celtic Tiger,” a destination that was sought out by
migrants from around the world.1 Th ey included not only workers from
the Eu ro pe an Union (EU), United States, Asia, and elsewhere but also
asylum seekers who were oft en from West Africa and Eastern Eu rope.
Asylum seekers are migrants who gain admission on the grounds that
they fear persecution. Th is book focuses on the Irish government’s and
public’s responses to pregnant asylum seekers who acquired legal resi-
dency by giving birth to children rather than by state verifi cation of their
claims of fearing persecution. Th ese women and their male partners rap-
idly became viewed as “illegal” migrants who falsely claimed asylum as a
means to enter the country and then, through birthing children, trans-
formed themselves into legal residents who had been neither selected
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