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Bledsoe and Sow
Family Reunification Ideals and the Practice of Transnational Reproductive Life among Africans in Europe
Caroline H. Bledsoe
Department of Anthropology
Northwestern University, IL, USA
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and
Papa Sow
Researcher in Social Sciences
CRER-Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, University of Warwick (U.K.).
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Mobile: +34 639 44 86 55
In press, inReproduction, Globalization, and the State. Carole H. Browner and Carolyn F. Sargent, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Introduction
In the European Union, as in much of the industrialized world, family life is quietly becoming the battleground of immigration struggles. It is doing so through the logics generated by family reunification, now a key mode of legal entry into Europe. Looking through the lenses of recent anthropological interests in transnationalism and reproduction, this paper examines the spread of global humanitarian conventions that have shaped family reunification, and their consequences for African marital and reproductive life in Europe. We suggest that family reunification doctrine, like any ideological system, can work against people as much as for them. Indeed, despite humanitarian claims to protect the family as the moral core of human relations, the same measures that were designed to bring families together can divide them along precisely the same fault lines they sought to safeguard.
To address the dynamics surrounding transnational marriage and parent-child relations, we join theoretical strands of social agency to the idea of population. We argue that to the extent that the state seeks overall agenda to include, it is likely to take a tolerant approach to family reunification practices. Under pressures to exclude, however, it may tighten regulatory scrutiny by attempting to enforce each piece of logic – age, relationship, quantity -- that underlies each reunification position, resulting in separate pathways for family members. For citizens of poor countries, social relationships and even age itself can become commoditized objects that people try to use to accommodate a narrowing set of entry demands structured by state policies by selecting individuals for migration whose attributes will most likely pass family reunification muster. The outcomes, representing varying mixes of opportunity and hardship, produce versions of family life that seem to range from minor variations on business as usual to harsh distortions of social practice.
To illustrate these points, we draw on a 2004-2007 collaborative ethnographic/demographic project entitled “Transnational Vital Events,” which involved three African groups in Europe: Moroccan youth in Spain, Cameroonian men and women in Germany, and Gambian families in Spain. In Germany, the post-war “gastarbeiter,” or “guestworker” period (from the 1950’s to the 1970’s), in which the nation actively sought outside labor, has long since ended. The same is true for the 1990s, when post-reunification Germany granted many asylum claims, most from the former Soviet Union. The country has tightened its labor market to such an extent that the few Africans who are offered entry are those seeking advanced training or jobs in highly technical fields.
Spain’s immigration situation is entirely different. Spain has now overtaken France as the leading European host country, proportionate to its national population, for immigrant arrivals.[i] However, geography and economy give rise to sharp dilemmas (Domingo and Houle 2005). Situated at the edge of the EU, with vast tracts of borderland exposed to the external world and an economy heavily reliant on agriculture and construction, this “interface” country is caught between pressure from its European neighbors to tighten its borders and the risk of excluding much-needed immigrant labor.
Confronting the challenges faced by these very disparate groups in countries with such different immigration profiles brings into sharp relief some otherwise obscure cultural logics underlying family reunification. After describing the background of reunification policies, we examine social practices surrounding marriage and reproduction that shape African immigrant life in Europe.
Background
As a topic in the age of transnationalism,[ii] the conduct of life across more than one national context, reproduction has drawn surprisingly little explicit attention in anthropology or sociology.[iii] In demography, the topic has taken the form of debates over whether immigrants’ youthful age pyramids might solve the economic and care crises posed by a rapidly aging Europe (United Nations, 2000; Coleman and Rowthorn 2004). Fertility levels across much of the world are falling rapidly, however, and most immigrants quickly adopt the levels of their host countries (Kulu 2005). For immigrants themselves, however, especially those from poor countries, concerns about reproductive life are very different. Birth remains an event of potentially mortal consequence not only in developing countries; where women and children in states that do not recognize them as legal residents can drop below the horizon of national health care.[iv] More generally, a transnational existence means that a state to which individuals do not belong can set the terms by which their reproductive lives must transpire. Shifts in law and policy undermine the predictability for conducting a work or reproductive life that “natives” take for granted (Bledsoe 2004b). While American tourists can enter Europe with a passport and the Schengen Agreement allows EU citizens to travel internally without visas or passport control, citizens of “high migration potential” countries are increasingly required to obtain expensive visas and undergo intensive scrutiny.[v] Additionally, fears of being denied re-entry make immigrants reluctant to travel internationally.
The legal architecture of family reunification
The twentieth century has seen an explosion of international law on human rights,[vi] including family reunification, the joining of previously separated, or newly acquired, ties to people whom society defines as a family. The most basic tenet of the human rights corpus is that all people, irrespective of citizenship, ethnicity, religion, or gender, have certain rights simply because they are human beings. Following World War I, calls for such measures were among the principal inspirations for the League of Nations. In the late 1940’s, following World War II, the United Nations Charter advocated “respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion” (Art. 1, para. 3). The UN’s Economic and Social Council charged its new Commission on Human Rights to draft an “International Bill of Human Rights,”[vii] urging governments “to provide for all human beings a life consonant with freedom and dignity and conducive to physical, mental, social and spiritual welfare.” Prominent among its expressed ideals was the right, irrespective of national boundaries, to a shared family life.[viii]
Family reunification doctrine, based on the humanitarian right to marry and found [*NB: the wording follow international conventions] a family, declares that certain relatives of a legal migrant, whether they became kin before or after the migrants’ move, should be allowed to join him or her in the new country of residence. Insisting on the family as the core unit of society, this doctrine gives the family precedence even over the nation state, which is charged to maintain the family’s integrity. If any element in humanitarian doctrine trumps the individual’s right to family life, however, it is the “best interests of the child,” spelled out most clearly in the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.[ix] The CRC, now adopted by all countries except Somalia and the United States, bestows on children, regardless of their nationality or whereabouts, the right to the care and company of a family: particularly of both parents, if possible, whether defined biologically or by formal adoption. Children thus have not just special rights, but special rights to live with their parents, and a CRC signatory state in which an unaccompanied child appears is obligated to facilitate this reunification. If the family cannot be found or is deemed unsuitable, the state is itself bound to become the guardian in order to constitute the parent to which the CRC declares the child is entitled.
Family reunification in practice
Despite the best of intentions, human rights measures spark debate. Disputes center on tensions between individual vs. collective rights; prioritizing universal standards over local practices; the financial hardship that upholding the conventions may impose on countries; and the imposition of what some argue is a Western patriarchal ideology on all countries.[x] Further, because each signatory state is expected to implement and enforce the principles through its own governance structures and civil codes, there is enormous variation in interpretation and enforcement standards among states (Bhabha 1998). Spain, for example, enacts international human rights and family reunification measures through its seventeen Autonomous Communities, whose administrative structures themselves differ in how they interpret and implement the rules. Further, there is considerable slippage between signature and practice. The various human rights bills and instruments themselves carry confusing legal messages. Covenants, statutes, protocols, and conventions are considered binding for their signatory states; declarations, principles, and guidelines are not , though they intended to provide implementation and moral guidance.[xi] And states may adhere selectively, or attach impossible conditions, to the principles they have pledged to uphold. Or they may simply ignore them.
For citizens of poor countries, bringing anyone at all to a distant nation [*NB: sometimes it is not new to them] is a daunting proposition. The costs alone are enormous, not just for transportation but for middlemen, translators, and lawyers, and there is every risk of encountering belligerent immigration officials and about being deported. One of the key challenges in bringing family members to Europe is the state’s powers to define precisely what a family is and who belongs to it. European family reunification laws extend to only a narrow range of relationships that people from many countries would call “family.” Most countries mark the boundary between childhood and adulthood chronologically, stipulating a minimum age of 18 for a spouse and less than 18 for a child.[xii] Further restrictions govern number of partners.[xiii] European countries are monogamous by law, and their family reunification policies follow suit: only one spouse at a time can have a social security card, a health card, and a legal residence permit. Additionally, EU pressures to exclude are shrinking qualifications for family reunification to a core of highly circumscribed ties with tight age windows and few allowable variations in sexual preference and marital status. Conjugal unions are increasingly policed to rule out what host countries see as immigration convenience (De Hart 2006).
Further struggles center on who, exactly, is a child and who is a parent. Most European countries follow the Convention on the Rights of the Child, defining childhood in temporal and dependency terms: an unmarried dependent below 18. For immigrants, however, states increasingly shrink the temporal boundaries of childhood. Citing difficulties in incorporating older children, the EU Court of Justice recently reaffirmed states’ rights to conduct mandatory “integration tests” for children 12 and over.[xiv] States also reduce childhood to a biological condition, employing sophisticated medical technologies to exclude those who do not qualify. According to Empez (personal communication), the first order of business for Spanish authorities who encounter newly arrived unaccompanied Moroccan youth is to take them to a hospital, less to ensure their welfare than to identify, through bone density scans, those who can be sent back immediately because they do not qualify biologically as “children.” The state may also challenge claims to parenthood. It may demand DNA tests for parents and children;[xv] and deny reunification for foster children who are not legally adopted, children suspected to be victims of trafficking, and children whose parents cannot meet state standards of stable employment or adequate income and accommodation.
Conceptualizing family reunification practice: selecting commoditized attributes
These descriptions paint a bleak picture of normative and state oppression. As in any lived experiential context, however, one finds multiple arenas of negotiation and tacit agreement to look the other way. To grasp a more rounded view of the dynamics surrounding humanitarian doctrine and the family reunification dynamics it generates, we draw on Strathern’s (1988) notion of the “partible self,” which sees personal identity as a collection of single attributes; gender, height, residence locale, family name, skin color – anything of social significance can be isolated out. These attributes are implicitly relational: defined with respect to other people. The notion of the partible self has particular utility when joined to a second notion: commodification, in which an entity is dissociated from its original context, designated as a universally exchangeable good, and put on the market for sale to the highest bidder (Appadurai 1986). Possessing a personal attribute with external commodity value may produce risk. A woman whose sexual attributes are separated from the entirety of her emotions and social ties, for example, can be rendered vulnerable to exploitation in the commercial sex trade: a domain of exchange over which she has little control (Gates 1996; Sharp 2000). Commodification of one’s partible attributes can also, however, bring benefit to individuals who possess attributes that qualify them, for special loans or training.
The notion of the self as a set of discrete, commodified facets finds ready application in immigration and family reunification practice. Immigration measures implicitly partition the self -- whether according to gender, job skills, or a nationality that is subject to political persecution elsewhere -- into personal characteristics that can be converted to transactable immigration value. For the case of family reunification, several points must be noted about the characteristics that would qualify an individual for inclusion. First, is their “relativity”: individuals’ characteristics have conversion value only relative to another person. Second is their demand for “otherness”: they must be converted across a national boundary, in a country to which one does not belong. Third, characteristics of potential family reunification value are conceived in quantitative terms. While the position of “child” can be plural, having multiple simultaneous holders, the “spouse” position is limited to a single holder. Though multiple individuals can circulate through such a position over time, it is effectively a “slot” that just one person at a time can occupy. Finally, the legal bases underlying each family reunification position differ: each individual, because he or she occupies a different status with respect to a migrant, implicitly orients to a distinct pathway of mobility. When pressures to exclude intensify, it should not be surprising that the categories laid out so carefully by human rights idealists themselves become the fault lines along which families splits may occur.
The idea of a self-composed of state-defined commoditized attributes is a useful way to frame family reunification for social science analysis. The problem is that few states achieve anything close to pure domination or even “governmentality” (Foucault 1979), which exacts compliance less by force than by enrolling individuals into disciplines of the self. Missing from such visions is a sense of the interplay between structure and individual action, a concern as valid to the analysis of immigration as to any other social phenomena. Combining the idea of “selection” from statistics (Heckman and Smith 1995) and agency perspectives from the social sciences, the notion of “acts of selection” (Bledsoe 2004a) acknowledges that individuals inevitably act with reference to structure. However, they try to shape the future less byresponding post-hoc to the structural constraints of the groups in which they find themselves, than prospectively, emphasizing those of their partible or commoditized attributes that qualify them for membership in groups offering the most desired pathways of opportunity.[xvi] This they may do through language or physical movement, and with respect to groups that are fleeting or longstanding. Applied to family reunification, this means that individuals may try to select themselves – or, of course, others -- into family relationships that offer immigration advantage. One notable example is the case of U.S. citizens who seek lower taxes abroad; such individuals may select themselves into foreign populations by drawing on attributes that would qualify them for citizenship elsewhere.[xvii] At the same time, with U.S. citizenship at such a global premium and other means of entering closing rapidly, being the parent of a U.S. citizen has become a heavily commoditized attribute for women from geographically proximate Mexico. Not only do they seek benefits of education and work for their children; they look toward the time when, 18 years hence, such a child may apply to reunify his/her family. Each year, therefore, many pregnant Mexican women try to select their children into the population of U.S. citizens by giving birth on U.S. soil, a guarantee of citizenship for their child under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, whether by undertaking dangerous desert or river crossings or by scheduling a caesarean section during a three-day visa stay.[xviii] Whereas individuals who see such pressures as problematic, may conclude that the advantages outweigh the risks.