Adjustment of Status through Marriage: State Strategies of Control and The Power of Resistance in Immigrant Tactics

The primary question driving this research regards how individuals in mixed-citizenship couples employ different strategies and/or tactics to access and maintain valid immigration status during processes of Adjustment of Status through marriage in the United States. A dominant narrative prevails in the US that immigration through marriage to a citizen confers immediate or an easy pathway to citizenship. For roughly two-hundred thousand immigrant spouses that currently navigate adjustment annually, however, this narrative falls short of and obscures the reality of adjustment processes. There is a lack of focused academic study to help contribute to more accurate public understandings of what these realities are. To combat this false narrative and help fill a gap in research, this work examines how such dominant ideology stems from historic legal inequality and hegemonic discourse, reified through Enlightenment-centric thinking and becoming tangled with state power through Foucault’s conception of the body politic. The day-to-day actions, interactions, and transactions within the body politic and adjustment processes are then put into conversation with De Certeau’s strategies and tactics, providing a means for accentuating how individuals, society, and the state enact specific practices to support or resist Foucauldian technologies of oppression and control. As an exploratory case-study, this work engages four individual partners from two mixed citizenship marriages in a series of three semi-structured, in-depth phenomenological interviews each. Reporting is centered on participant’s histories and adjustment narratives, told through their own voices. Evidence supports that easy pathway public narratives are inaccurate, that adjustment processes assert state power on citizen petitioners and migrant spouses alike, but in different ways, and that they in turn enact complicated and intertwined strategies and tactics to achieve adjustment and resist the oppressive power of the state that is carried through adjustment processes.