Nineteenth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

When U.S. citizens petitions for a visa for a non-citizen spouse, U.S. immigration investigates the couple to determine if the relationship is ‘fraudulent’ (i.e. for immigration papers) or ‘genuine’ (i.e. for love). Since love is intangible, suspicions of marriage fraud rest on beliefs about what a relationship should be like. I argue that nativist discourses of racialized and gendered legitimacy, applied to family and sexuality, are used to define marriage fraud. This paper focuses on U.S. citizen women who are petitioning for visas for men of color from mid-developing countries. The evidence combines an online ethnography and textual analysis of a large-online immigration forum. I find that citizen women construct marriage fraud around a hegemonic U.S. family ideal that emphasize racial purity and procreation. As petitioners try to leverage their own family ties to make claims for their foreign partners’ access to citizenship, other forum members use counter-narratives that deploy stereotypically negative images and narratives about Black men’s sexuality and family commitments. Both family statuses and racial distrust inform how men from Sub-Saharan Africa are viewed with suspicion. Intersectional racial and gender inequalities of citizenship are no longer explicitly named in the law but continue to be used to police U.S. women’s relationships with men of color.