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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Legal Studies

Selected Works

Selected Works

2016

Citizenship

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Juarez Wives Club: Gendered Citizenship And Us Immigration Law, Ruth Gomberg-Munoz Apr 2016

The Juarez Wives Club: Gendered Citizenship And Us Immigration Law, Ruth Gomberg-Munoz

Ruth Gomberg-Munoz

When US citizens sponsor their undocumented
spouses for lawful status, they find themselves at
the center of immigration petitions. They are
invasively scrutinized, treated with bureaucratic
indifference, and separated from their loved ones.
As this “politics of exception,” which often targets
migrants, is unleashed on US citizens, they learn
that their citizenship offers little protection from
dehumanizing treatment. Instead, restrictive
immigration criteria, designed in theory to boost
the value of US citizenship, in practice dehumanize
US citizens and can alienate them from feelings of
national belonging. This contradiction inevitably
emerges when shared lives disrupt the boundaries of
citizenship status, illuminating …