1 Introduction

Mehdi is among the small number of people I managed to interview in person, before the COVID-19 pandemic moved my research mostly online.Footnote 1 We sat across from one another in a small office space, both cradling cups of hot tea. Gradually the cups emptied and were forgotten; the sun set, and the conversation warmed and became more intimate. Mehdi stopped apologizing for his more critical statements—something I had to earn, may never fully earn, and that has to be said up front (I am White and a US citizen; my experience with the family immigration system is not as a migrant but as a petitioning spouse). The critical statements ranged from observations about our respective governments, the web of laws designed to demoralize and dissuade; to the toll of concealing his relationship in an unsupportive workplace; to concerns about his marriage itself. The last were offered the most carefully, the most apologetically, and I reassured him many times that I knew and believed he loved his husband.

Mehdi pulled out his phone to show me their photos, beautiful men smiling into each other’s eyes. There was delight in this gesture—mine in the photos, his in my responses to them. Yet the moment begs a question: to what extent did people experience the interview itself as another test of their love? I remember printing my text messages, pages upon pages of daily intimacies, and handing these over to the immigration official who would decide whether my marriage was real or fraudulent. Did my interview trigger the same performativity that is demanded of such couples at every turn?

There is no place in this process for reservations. This is why it took such trust for Mehdi to tell me that he is, in fact, too young to be married. This is his first relationship, after all. He said, laughing but also in seriousness, that this feels like some kind of traditional arrangement, marrying without experience. In truth, his husband, Dominic, has all the qualities he desires. Dominic is attentive, committed, and family-oriented; he worries over Mehdi’s safety and health in a way that makes Mehdi feel treasured; he is a good cook; he has a close relationship with Mehdi’s parents in the role of a ‘friend’ and has never pressured Mehdi to come out to them. The relationship itself is not the problem. But marriage is another matter. Ideally, Mehdi would have waited. Maybe a year or two, maybe longer. He worries about rushing in.

It is impossible to say, from this study, whether the rushing in damaged an otherwise healthy relationship in some way. But the question is there. And Mehdi is not exceptional among my interviewees. Others expressed similar things: whatever their feelings about marriage, they would have preferred not to entangle it with immigration status. However, this became the only way forward.

Mehdi’s story and others like it are the inspiration for this chapter. Through a generosity of time and personal disclosure, they have made it possible for me to delineate some of the costs of constructing a ‘bona fide’ marriage for immigration purposes. Many of these costs are shared with heterosexuals, while others are unique to or intensified for queers. All occur in the context of a system that enjoys broad public support, described, for instance, as ‘one of the most generous approaches to family-based immigration in the world’ (Abrams, 2013: 7), the cornerstone of [US] immigration policy (cited critically in Lee, 2013; see especially Chap. 1), and ‘the right way’ to enter the United States.Footnote 2

Van Oost et al. (this volume) argue that ideologies widely seen as moral truths conceal prejudices that people would otherwise be loath to express. The narrative of there being a ‘right way’ to immigrate is widely regarded as a moral truth and can operate as such a cover. That is, people feel comfortable expressing anti-immigrant views by couching their prejudices in an endorsement of ‘legal’ immigration and (alleged) support for those who enter the country in this manner. Many people in this study were sensitive to the endorsement and privileging of migration through marriage to a US citizen or permanent resident. They witnessed how such endorsements were used against other migrants, immigrants, and families, and this deepened the ambivalence they felt about having to rely on it for their own security. This ambivalence, knotted up with the many financial, personal, and relational costs of the marriage immigration system, was a persistent theme in our conversations and one I explore in this chapter.

I approach this topic as a family scholar. My research has pulled me into many realms, and I am grateful to the legal scholars and historians who have helped me to contextualize this work. My own contributions are in the ways that these macro shifts manifest in our closest relationships. Namely: How do the normative and normalizing systems of marriage and immigration impact the individual and couple? What conflicts arise, and how do people deal with them? What is the day to day experience of becoming a ‘bona fide’ married couple in the eyes of the State?

2 Embodying Marriage and Fiancé Visas

The process of getting a spousal or fiancé visa can seep into the bones of a relationship. It touches everything, from life-altering decisions—is it the right time to marry? should we come out to our families?—to mundane daily tasks, like whether someone’s name is on the electric bill and who is picking up the kid when mom goes for her biometrics appointment. Writing about the UK family visa, Turner and Espinoza (2021) describe this as ‘intimate labor’ and ‘intimate archiving’ of our lives together. Their autoethnography and conversations with couples register the emotional tenor of this labor: an obsessive need to record everything; increased fights; deeper bonding; an impending sense of unease—‘like someone was squeezing my heart,’ a participant said (ibid: 9).

The archive, Turner and Espinoza argue, is not just documenting forms of intimacy in our relationships, but producing them. The story of us is a part of the ‘us’ we become. Tran (2021) illustrates a similar principle through interviews with women who are in marriages that the Canadian government would describe as ‘fraudulent’—that is, legal marriages that enable the women to settle in Canada without romance or reproduction/permanent family formation as their goal. While doing the intimate labor of immigration that Turner and Espinoza describe, some of these marriages transformed into lasting romantic unions. Tran’s study joins others in exposing the artificial borders between ‘fake’ or ‘fraudulent’ and ‘real’ or ‘bona fide’ intimacy.

The fallacies of the real/fake marriage dichotomy are by now well documented in the literature. Scholars have shown with piercing clarity the harm inflicted on couples who are categorized and surveilled in this way—a part of the glue binding marriage migration regimes to larger projects of national identity and purity (e.g., D’Aoust, 2018; Chang, 2020; Groes & Fernandez, 2018, see especially chapters by Bofulin, Constable, Maskens, and Fernandez; Hamano, 2019; Ishii, 2016, see especially chapters by Kudo, Grillot, and Chetsumon; Lan, 2008; Lee-An, 2020; Longo, 2018; Myrdahl, 2010; Pellander, 2021; Wemyss et al., 2018—this is a representative list, not an exhaustive one). These projects are not ‘out there’ somewhere but felt and fought in our daily lives and most intimate relations.

A majority of this scholarship centers heterosexual marriages. There are good reasons for this. Access to marriage migration is new and still limited to a small number of countries for same-sex couples. LGBTQ+ people who migrate in the context of different-sex (heterosexual-appearing) marriages are largely invisible to the research community and public. As laws have changed and awareness has grown, a new body of work is emerging on how gender and sexually diverse couples navigate this immigration pathway (e.g., Chauvin et al., 2021; Vuckovic Juros, 2021, this volume; Kassan & Nakamura, 2013; Luibhéid, 2018, 2022; Mathur, 2021; White, 2013; Yue, 2008). This is not merely an issue of representation and inclusion—although it is that, too. Beginning from a queer point of view is also an analytic shift, one that can freshly illuminate the ways that borders and bordering practices are mutually constituted and shaped (see Cassidy et al., 2018; Vuckovic Juros et al., this volume). Queer communities are—like many other minoritized communities—deeply familiar with state intrusion into their/our sexual and intimate lives, as well as insistence by others that their/our relationships are not real or worthy of protection. The work of becoming a ‘bona fide’ couple for US immigration is situated in the multitude of histories that people carry within them: the violence to which a queer relationship or person was already subjected; modes of survival practiced individually and as a couple; entanglements of love with class, caste, race, national origin, and other axes of power and distribution; to name a few.

It is here, with these intersecting histories in mind, that I invite readers to meet the interlocutors who will walk with you through the chapter.

3 Methodology

I began this study interested in how LGBTQ+ people construct and tell their own stories of marriage migration to the United States. To explore this, I conducted 30 in-depth interviews; collected and coded just over 3000 posts in three online forums devoted to spousal and fiancé immigration; and analyzed migrants’ and couples’ public narratives in the form of videos, short films, and memoirs. In all cases, I focused on LGBTQ+ identified individuals and/or same-sex couples. This work flowed into a second stream of inquiry into the cultural toolkits available to couples as they prepare their petitions. Oriented by what couples themselves had shared, I analyzed governmental and non-governmental texts advising LGBTQ+ people about marriage immigration, including self-help books, websites, and podcasts; reports and directives published by immigration agencies; and materials provided to couples by law firms and embassies. These texts reflect and reproduce discourses of love, marriage, family, and immigration that structure officials’ assessment of couples and couples’ identity work to appear ‘bona fide.’ Often these discourses clash with applicants’ own cultural scripts around marriage and family, as well as their/our personal values and desires.

3.1 My Path to the Research

The themes of this chapter touched my life some years before I began to read and think about them as a scholar. My own binder of immigration materials tells this story: numbered plastic sleeves corresponding to an elaborate table of contents; originals and copies of every document; a cover photo of me and my then-partner, T., on New Year’s Eve in Taipei. This was the photo I chose to represent us (pushing, maybe, against the bureaucratized version of us inside): me in a red dress leaning into her arms; she tall and masculine and handsome, her hands firmly around my hips; the polaroid giving us a vintage sheen. I remember texting a photo of the polaroid to T. the morning after it was taken. ‘That’s great,’ she wrote back. ‘I look euphoric about grabbing your ass XD.’ Beside the binder with its polaroid cover is an envelope holding our divorce papers. I hate that they say Amy Brainer (Plaintiff) v. T. T. (Defendant). Neither of us was ever v. the other; I am still for T. in every inch of my spirit. Although she initiated the divorce, we both felt it was safer to file after her planned move to Hong Kong, as her status in the US was tied to our marriage. Agreeing to do this was my final and, I think, most loving act of our marriage. And so the papers, the photo, the binder and everything inside congealed into an archive, a curated timeline of the life we created together and then gradually took apart.

This experience opened something in me—a mental pathway toward this research. Experience can also be a mental block, opening one path while closing others. Like every story I write about, mine is neither replicable nor generalizable; its value is not in what it reveals about other couples, but in what it reveals about the particular relations of ruling (Smith, 1990) that shape my life and work. The challenge is not to get stuck inside our own stories. On a practical level, for me, this includes temporarily suspending my training to look for patterns. Of course, patterns emerge and some become important. But patterns and categories can quickly become vehicles for the biases we bring to our projects—cultural, linguistic, social, personal—as well as biases from our disciplines and expertise. With this in mind, I have tried to engage each narrative as a whole and on its own terms before bringing it into conversation with theories and concepts gleaned from other interviews and texts.

3.2 In-Depth Interviews: Who is Included? Who is Missing?

To launch the interview portion of the study, I distributed flyers in Arabic, Chinese, English, and Spanish through immigrant-serving organizations, LGBTQ-serving organizations, and listservs for immigration lawyers and advocates. Some organizations and listservs were national in scope, while others focused on a particular city or region. Reflecting this, the preliminary interviewees are spread across the US South (40%), Midwest (30%), and East and West Coasts (30%). Nearly everyone entered the study because a trusted person shared it with them. In Mehdi’s case, for instance, a Pakistani neighbor texted him a photo of the flyer on the wall of a local community center and urged him to participate. He felt touched that she, a heterosexual woman, had noticed the study and taken the time to share it with him. The flyer was on the wall in the first place because a former student of mine worked at the center and vouched for my study. It is through such chains of relationships—rather than cold calls from public posts—that a majority of interviews came about.

I conducted the interviews in people’s preferred languages, arranging for interpreters to be present as needed.Footnote 3 The politics of language and interpretation is something I examine more deeply in the larger study. Most interviewees are in what appears, on paper, to be a ‘same-sex’ marriage. This of course is complicated as people’s legal sex markers, and how they present to immigration officials, do not always reflect their genders or how they personally experience the relationship. Six are LGBTQ+ identified and in what is or appears to be a ‘heterosexual’ marriage.Footnote 4 Among the 30 interviewees, birth years range from the 1960s to the 1990s, with 70% born in the 1970s and 1980s, placing them in their 30 s and 40 s at the time of this research. The interview sample is gender diverse and educationally privileged. Forty percent hold graduate degrees, another 44% hold bachelor’s or associate’s degrees, and 16% have a high school diploma. This—and the fact that immigrants and naturalized citizens in the study have, on average, slightly higher education than their US-born spouses—reflect the class selectivity of the system they have had to navigate (on class and family immigration, see Bonjour & Chauvin, 2018; Chauvin et al., 2021; Engzell & Ichou, 2020; López, 2017; Pellander, 2021).

I entered the immigration forums, in a large part, to locate more class-diverse voices than those I had managed to interview. People who could not afford lawyers relied heavily on the forums as they worked through their applications. Financial concerns were common. At times, they deterred couples from completing or even beginning the process. In this regard, a selection of voices missing from the interview portion of the study—those who could not afford to proceed—comprise the starting point for this analysis.

4 Financial Costs of a ‘Bona Fide’ Marriage

An icon of caution.

CAUTION

There will be other expenses. If you’re trying to figure out how much to budget for this process, don’t forget the costs of required items other than the fees, such as photos, the medical exam, and having documents translated or notarized.

– Ilona Bray, ed. (2019) Fiancé and Marriage Visas: A Couple’s Guide to US Immigration: p. 13Footnote 5

Omg. That is way out of reach for me.

(Forum member hoping to sponsor his transgender fiancée, responding to a $10k cost estimate provided by another couple)

Marriage immigration to the United States is prohibitively expensive. Some of the costs are immediately visible, like the ever-increasing filing fees and the strict income requirements to file at all. The US citizen partner must prove that they can support the couple at 125% of the poverty line (this one stopped T. and me from applying before I got my faculty job and had my new, middle class paycheck direct deposited for several months). Income and assets belonging to the non-citizen partner do not count toward this affidavit of support. Hidden costs, like those in the cautionary epigraph, can further strain the couple’s budget. For instance, couples have no say in when their many appointments will be held. This may entail taking time off work for one or both partners and arranging for childcare. Lengthy travel may be required. One of my interviewees, Renato, traveled from his home in northern Brazil to Rio de Janeiro for his consular interview, adding upwards of one thousand US dollars (around six thousand Brazilian dollars) in hotel and airfare to the ballooning price tag of his application. ‘You have to have a lot of money,’ he said. ‘Otherwise how are you going to pay for all that stuff?’

Couples living apart have to show evidence of frequent meetings to prove that their relationships are real. How many visits and for how long are common questions put to the immigration forums by new applicants. The consensus is usually that more visits are better. Expenses like these can quickly drain any savings that a person has managed to put away. It can tip the power dynamic between a couple, creating dependency where there was none before. It depletes the resources that individuals have to leave if the relationship sours.

People whose immigration papers are tied to marriage are among those deemed inadmissible (meaning they can be denied status or deported) if they receive public cash assistance, are institutionalized for long-term care, or are likely to be in the future.Footnote 6 It is up to immigration officials—many of whom have personal biases in addition to the institutionally mandated biases of the immigration system—to consider a person’s ‘totality of circumstances’ in order to predict whether this will happen (see Faber, 2020 on the interpretation, application, and broad discriminatory reach of this policy). The Trump administration added many more benefits to the catalogue of those that make someone inadmissible, including, but not limited to, housing, rental, and food assistance and federally funded health coverage for people with low incomes. While the Biden administration rolled back the Trump era expansion, the ‘chilling effect’ is lasting. Many people are afraid to receive assistance of any kind, including, during the core field period, COVID-19 relief and health care, for fear that it will jeopardize their immigration status (Makhlouf & Sandhu, 2020).

Class selectivity colors the process in other ways as well. One couple shared that they were advised to have ‘friends who are doctors or lawyers, friends with titles’ write the required letters affirming their relationship as real. The friends who really knew them as a couple did not have advanced degrees; most were not US citizens and thus could not write letters at all. Instead, they relied on people they only tangentially knew—and yet whose words about them carried more weight purely based on national origin and profession.

Marriage and fiancé visas filter people by socioeconomic status. While ostensibly uniting families, they are in fact uniting only families with means—families who can meet the income requirements and jump through every financial hoop. This is a hardship for people of every sexual orientation and gender. Compounding this is the fact that LGBTQ+ people are overrepresented among the poor. In the United States, LGBQ+ people are more likely than similarly situated heterosexuals to be unemployed or underemployed, to be housing insecure or homeless, and to lack health insurance, among many other indicators of poverty; the rates of poverty and extreme poverty (making $10 k or less per year) among trans people are higher still (see DeFilippis, 2016 for a review of this literature; James et al., 2016 for national statistics; Glick et al., 2019 for a qualitative study/deeper dive). Family-based means for sharing costs, such as co-sponsorship of the affidavit of support, are less available to queer and trans people whose families may not support their relationships or know about them. Poverty and withdrawal of family support are high among sexually and gender nonconforming populations in other parts of the world as well (see, among many examples, Bhagat, 2018; Connell, 2021; Shah, 2014). The combined conditions of LGBTQ+ poverty, withdrawal of traditional support structures, and costs of migration to the US through marriage make this pathway steep if not impassable for many couples.

In one particularly heart-wrenching story in the immigration forums, a couple tried to decide whether to put the money toward their petition and the visits required to get a fiancé visa, or toward the transgender partner’s surgery. Lacking the money to do both, their choice became one between the creation of their family and life-changing (for many life-saving) healthcare. They chose her life. The last time the couple posted, they still had not found a way to be together.

5 Personal and Relational Costs

Home > Forums >> How can I move to be with my girlfriend??Footnote 7

outropurple: I’m lost about where to start and what to do to be honest. I’m too young to get married now. It feels like unless I get married there is no way for me to move [to the US to be with my partner] and I’m really sad about it. I will appreciate any help from you guys!

Lenaswife: How old are you? Do you mean legally too young or just that you are not ready for marriage?

outropurple: I’m 23 and I’m not ready for that

Lenaswife: Ah. The US doesn’t have any partner visas, unfortunately. All roads lead to marriage. You could try alternative things, like work visas, or look at a third country. Good luck.

hrabarishere: Problem is, billions of people would claim they’re moving to be with their partner if there was a way to do it.

Reading posts and comments, we supply the tone. I first read ‘good luck’ as a shrug. Dismissive. Then as gentle and genuine. A period reads like a closed door. But, Lenaswife stuck around in the chat. Hrabarishere posted once, dropping in to say only this. No one replied, and my mind went to work on tone again. Matter of fact. The user is repeating what he understands to be an unfortunate but necessary rule, in language that is normal to him. Maybe he sees in these ‘billions’ of potential claimants the ‘invading hordes’ conjured by nativist politicians. Maybe, like many people who continue to live in the countries where they were born, he condemns the ‘invading hordes’ imagery as racist, yet accepts its underlying premises: that immigration must be strictly controlled and contained; that it makes sense to stratify newcomers based on state-sanctioned romantic attachments to permanent residents and citizens; that non-marital reasons for wanting to move are somehow less trustworthy. However hrabarishere intended for it to land, this watered down version of a deeper anti-immigrant message went unchecked in the forum.

Users sympathized with outropurple, but, as I found across the platform, people were quick to point out that ‘everyone’ experiences such challenges and this is simply a part of the process. Actually, as far as the US and its visa requirements are concerned, you are a normal international couple, someone wrote. There is no easy way to simply pick up and move to the US. (I thought of my own family: my White US citizen parents picked up and moved to China in the eighties and again in the nineties, living there for 20 years in total; I left our family home in China for college, then returned for a year simply because I missed it; I also picked up and moved to Taiwan in 2011 to do my fieldwork. In none of these instances did anyone question my/our right to ‘simply pick up and move.’) Outropurple thanked everyone sincerely for their comments. Her final post reiterated her hope of finding a way to migrate without getting married.

Back in the office—in the scene that opened this chapter—Mehdi walked me through his decision to marry his partner Dominic. He made a list on paper, pros and cons. He spoke to the neighbor who later gave him the research flyer and to his elder brother. He listened to Dominic’s fears about their future together and to his own heart.

‘My brother told me, why not? He’s the best person to be with. And it’s better for you, you can travel. I want to see my sister so badly. I haven’t seen her since 2013. And I have a really close relationship with my sister. I just miss my sister and family a lot. And I have not seen my new nephew. Just…’ he gestured toward the cell phone in his lap.

‘Just on the phone,’ I said.

‘Yeah. Just, you know …’

‘It’s totally different.’

‘I feel like I’m missing out on all the things I could do with my family. All of this, you know, insecurity made me do this. Cuz I feel I’m insecure. Nothing will change in the American laws that will allow me to travel as a Syrian, with the Syrian ban. And the green card process is getting so hard through work. Like even if I am working, I need like six, seven, eight years in a really good position. And I’m not sure if I’m going to get a management position within six, seven years… I want to actually enjoy my life. I don’t want to lose my life. I’m now 31. I have friends in Brazil, I want to go see them; I want to go to Lebanon [to see my family there]. This is part of it. To have security. To have access to life.’

Access to life. The phrase stuck with me, not just in my fieldnotes but in my spirit. Mehdi later texted to tell me that his green card had been approved and he was going to visit his sister and nephew. The text was brimming with exclamation points and with joy. Security is not just a legal matter; it is psychological, emotional, relational. I could feel Mehdi’s lightness, and I responded in kind. I still feel happiness when I think about that text. And yet, why should Mehdi’s freedom to see his sister and nephew be legally tied to his relationship with Dominic? In their case, the system worked smoothly; theirs is a ‘success’ story. But the system predicates so much—access to life—on a single romantic union. How does a young relationship absorb such pressure?

Enriquez (2020) devotes a chapter of her book, On Love and Papers, to formerly undocumented young adults who have legalized their status through marriage. These young people and their US citizen spouses faced not only legal and financial hurtles, but emotional and relational ones as well. Many resisted entangling marriage and immigration, not wanting to open such a personal and precious part of their lives to a fractured and discriminatory system. Others described ways that immigration pressures wore on their relationships, forced them to pause or fast-forward their lives, and extracted an emotional toll that lasted for years after the process itself had ended. Enriquez argues that tying love to immigration status ‘complicates marriage as the next step in family formation — discouraging it in some cases, encouraging it in others, and infusing all relationships with emotional baggage’ (ibid: 120–121). She finds that this baggage exists even in cases that are relatively straightforward.

My interviewees described similar baggage—a weight shared across sexual orientation and gender. They also described personal and relational costs that they connected more directly to being queer. To be sure, the ‘normalizing’ I describe next is something straight people also struggle with; they, too, feel pressure to perform ‘traditional’ marriage and family in ways that are inauthentic. For many LGBTQ+ people, there is an additional layer in that these pressures impinge on sexual cultures and identities that are often hard fought and cherished.

5.1 Homonormalizing?

Starting the process to obtain her green card, T. and I were told it would be best if we had ‘a mortgage and kids’ (we had neither). Around the same time, a queer friend asked me whether I thought our open marriages would harm our respective cases, as she scrubbed all traces of non-monogamy from social media and other places that immigration officials could freely invade. An interviewee in an open relationship anticipated scrutiny because he is taking PrEP, an HIV prevention method, which he is required to report along with other medications as part of the mandated medical exam that is part of the application process. A bisexual interviewee, Desiree, made an extra effort to embody ‘the typical heterosexual relationship’ when she petitioned for her husband: ‘I made sure that I concealed any relationships that I had with women in the past because I didn’t want it to be seen as—I don’t know—noncommittal. Because I feel like that’s the way that all bisexuals get looked at, like, “You’re noncommittal. You’re all over the place. You like everyone.”’ Her concerns are well founded; research shows that state suspicion toward bisexuality does create obstacles for queer women in other immigration proceedings (see, for example, Lewis, 2013; Rehaag, 2008; Sin, 2014), and there is no reason to think that marriage cases will be the exception. On top of this, Desiree predicted (also with good reason) that immigration officials would find it inconceivable that her husband, who is Muslim, would want to marry a bisexual woman because of their stereotypes about his culture and faith. The possibility of these interlocking assumptions about bisexuality and Muslim identity, in a person with such power over their lives, was a risk she could not afford to take.

As I was analyzing these data, my colleague Shuzhen Huang published an analysis of her own experience with marriage-based migration to the US:

A more accurate statement would be that I had to rather than decided to get married. To sustain our queer relationship [in the US], I was put in a position where performing the heteropatriarchal tradition of marriage seemed the only viable choice… Access to permanent residency demands assimilation to white cisheteronormativity. The rhetoric of acceptance, therefore, entraps the queer migrant — acceptance requires compliance to a set of normative ideals, a contradiction to the spirit of queerness, which is about resistance and a refusal to be contained. The rhetoric of acceptance regulates queerness and yet demands transnational queers of color be ‘grateful immigrants’ (Huang, 2020: 85 & 87).

Passing as monogamous, as monosexual, as ‘grateful immigrants,’ as seeking normal and non-disruptive lives, is not without personal and relational costs. The negation of queerness that Huang describes is a cost as well. This is perhaps less visible to a society that constructs queer people, like immigrants, as jealous of what the dominant group imagines itself to possess. Traces of this mindset emerge even among well-meaning allies (and some gay people themselves) who say, ‘it’s not a choice; who would choose to be gay?’ That gay people might prefer our lives to those of heterosexuals is still, for many, unimaginable.

There is an urge, including on the political left, to treat structural conditions as personal characteristics—in this case, compliance and refusal as individual expressions of critical consciousness or lack thereof. But, my interlocutors are not ‘homonormative’ as a matter of taste or preference. Many have complicated relationships to the state and to marriage, and are ambivalent about entangling these things. Put another way, it is not that homonormative people seek to be married and immigrate, but that marriage and immigration systems produce homonormativity and enforce it. For the individual and couple, this can create ambivalence and at times conflict.

Ambivalence showed up in other parts of people’s narratives as well. The push to marry was, for some, followed by a push to naturalize—another step they would not necessarily have chosen, or would have delayed if not for the immense pressure placed on them by the US government. Becoming a ‘bona fide’ married couple involves a certain narrative: monogamous, monosexual, lifelong, financially dependent or interdependent, desiring of children and a home together. As Desiree put it, ‘they want to know that my dream is to marry this man and have his children.’ Becoming a US citizen involves a parallel narrative, the fabrication of a dream, suppressing the ambivalence and conflict that for many are a part of this experience.

6 Ambivalence and Citizenship

In the dreamland, immigrants’ imagined longing for US citizenship affirms the colonial project: ‘America’ as a promised land, bequeathed to some, coveted by all. The narrative is so embraced that it is difficult for many US citizens to conceptualize immigration in any other way. Dina Nayeri recalls, in her memoir, a conversation from her childhood: ‘Once in an Oklahoma church, a woman said, “Well, I sure do get it. You came for a better life.” I thought I’d pass out… life in Iran was a fairytale. In Oklahoma, we lived in an apartment complex for the destitute and the disenfranchised… A better life? The words lodged in my ear like grit’ (2019: 7). At my kitchen table, my friend and interlocutor Yan, now a dual US-Taiwanese citizen, shared with me why she had naturalized:

Everyone I told congratulated me about becoming a citizen. I probably wouldn’t say this to most Americans, but I don’t feel really positive about becoming a citizen, or feel proud of it, or feel that it’s something I need to be congratulated for. Even though it made my life so much easier. According to Xiomara [Yan’s partner, who naturalized some years earlier] now I can go protest without being, like… Even if I get arrested [for protesting], I won’t get kicked out of the country. Maybe there is a little bit of relief because once Trump became the president, even some permanent residents were worried. They can still be deported and their status can be taken away. That’s why we sped up the process. If he was not elected I probably would still be a permanent resident now. And I have heard that from my colleague, she’s from Mexico and she’s a permanent resident. Her husband is also from Mexico. They have three children who are Americans. So they also have to speed up their process because they’re worried that they may be separated. Yeah, I guess that’s part of why I became a citizen. It really was Xio who kept pushing me – oh, you should put in your application now, you shouldn’t wait. You don’t want to risk it, blah blah blah.

From her side eye at all the congratulations to her concluding ‘blah blah blah,’ Yan smoothly sidestepped the smoke and mirrors of the naturalization narrative. The decision to become a citizen was, for her, a pragmatic one, accelerated by the actions of the US electorate and the administration they put into power, political tremors that threatened her personal security. Of course, emotions around these processes vary, as do the stakes attached to them. In contrast to Yan’s ‘little bit of relief,’ another interviewee described the flood of relief she felt in moving, in her case, from unrecognized status to DACA to permanent residency through marriage; ‘like being born again,’ she said. But, it was still relief, as the US government eased its own severe restrictions on her mobility and life, the constant, stomach churning stress of deportability. In this, as in so many of its benevolent postures, the state is solving a problem of its own making.

The marriage and immigration systems in which these choices are entangled distribute life chances unevenly through the population by design. Exclusion of queers based on sexuality and gender has, in relatively recent history, given way to stratification along other lines: financial means; the ability to perform love and commitment in ways that appear ‘bona fide’ to immigration officials; mode of entry to the United States, determining who is eligible to regularize their status through marriage. People in this study did not view their new relationship to the state uncritically. Security necessitated that they capitulate to its demands: get married; not only get married, but normalize and traditionalize the marriage as much as possible; not only normalize, but naturalize and (appear to) assimilate. In their homes and hearts, however, desires were more complex—the freedom to go and come, the right to protest—a spider web of cracks in the structures imposed on their lives.

7 Conclusion: Against Gratitude

we are not grateful… we are not in this together.

  • José Guadalupe Herrera Soto (2020) Queer and Trans Migrations: 202

Talk of immigration has become, in Nayeri’s words, ‘hostile, even unhinged’ (2019: 12). Yet, the critique that unfolds in her book is not of the people and politicians who wear their xenophobia on their sleeves. Rather, it is of men and women who are kindly and politely discriminating, moved by stories of suffering, suspicious of interests and dreams that they cultivate in their own children but deem ‘opportunistic’ in individuals whose papers and passports differ from theirs. To really change this will require much more than protecting or unblocking the narrow and precarious routes to legal permanent residency and citizenship, systems that trade what Mehdi called ‘access to life’ for compliance, gratitude, and assimilation.

People in this study described financial, personal, and relational costs while emphasizing how small they were in comparison to what others had to pay. Someone spoke of ‘survivor’s guilt’ having had an easier route through US immigration compared to compatriots who were not married to citizens. Another anticipated the response from her family: would they be angry that, after naturalization, she had sponsored her partner and not one of them? A third person took pains to remind me, with each critique of the process that our conversation unearthed, ‘it hasn’t been so bad for me; others have experienced worse.’ Interviewees were knowledgeable about the immigration system, drenched as it is in human rights abuses, family separations, detentions and deportations. Their statements were acts of solidarity with other migrants. They were also, at times, a part of the emotional labor of gratitude.

Ambivalence is a major artery through this chapter: mixed feelings about the pressure to marry; about sanitizing the archives of our relationships; about the pressure to naturalize; about the celebrations that follow; about the power of the state to tell people what to dream, to congratulate them for it, to expect their thanks; about the stress, indignities, and privileges that simultaneously characterize this experience. I have rewritten this penultimate paragraph many times. I do not want to conclude by telling readers how to think about all this. That would, I think, do a disservice to what my interlocutors have shared. Instead, I hope the ambivalence is palpable and sticky, clinging to readers who have never thought about these things before; bearing witness for those who know them intimately. I am comfortable letting the chapter end uneasily.

In the same office where I interviewed Mehdi, a student stopped by a few weeks ago to ask me whether marriage to a US citizen is the best way to get a green card, or whether he should focus on getting one through work. Or should he try for asylum status? As a young student he had neither a long-term partner nor a career, and all possible roads—toward and away from the United States—racked him with anxiety. He asked me not because of my research but because I am the only adult who knows that he is bisexual, that he is afraid. And so we sat, again with tea, in the painful space at the borders of sexuality, intimacy, family, and nation, while I searched for words and he searched for ways, as Mehdi put it seasons before, to have security, to have access to life.