Congratulations to grad student Jane Lilly López, whose paper “ ‘Impossible Family’: How the Law Shapes the Lives of Mixed Citizenship Status Couples” has been accepted for publication by Law & Policy.
Her study explores the complex and contradictory relationship between citizenship in the law and the immigrant reality of mixed-citizenship family life through in-depth interviews with individuals in mixed-citizenship marriages. An examination of mixed-citizenship marriage exposes the inadequacies of approaching citizenship as an individual-centered concept. The data indicate that, though both immigration and citizenship laws focus on the individual, the repercussions of those laws have family-level effects. Because of their spouses’ immigrant status, many citizens are obliged by the law to live the immigrant experience in their own country or to become immigrants themselves.