Becoming Legal: Immigration Law and Mixed-Status Families

Becoming Legal: Immigration Law and Mixed-Status Families, by Ruth GombergMuñoz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

In this unique academic approach to how immigration processes work, Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz challenges, defines, and articulates the intimate relationships created between immigration policy and practices and families from Mexican descent who have decided to make the United States their home. On the book cover, a young man holds an emblem that reads "We want our mother here!" The phrase resonates throughout the book, with its emphasis on the reunification of families whose migratory mixed status in the United States has become complex and perilous. The signal phrase also underscores the lack of humanity embedded in immigration laws that specifically target people of Mexican descent. Gomberg-Muñoz tackles head on and without apology the cynicism and hypocrisy of civil society when she confronts general questions about unauthorized migration. Questions such as "Why don't undocumented people wait their turn to enter the United States legally?" and "Why don't they legalize their status once they have U.S. citizen relatives?" display "convenient naivete." But Gomberg-Muñoz answers these questions nonetheless, contributing in the process two main arguments to immigration and transnational studies.

Gomberg-Muñoz underlines how immigrants with mixed-immigration statuses in the United States experience immigration processes quite differently, depending on their place of origin, their gender, race, and sexuality. Second, she attests to the fact that the criminal justice system is tightly linked to the immigration system, insofar as immigration categories are not arbitrary but are imposed on some immigrants who are deemed unacceptable. Undocumented Mexican immigrants-those who crossed illegally and those who overstayed their visa-she argues, not only work very hard to make a living, but they also create and nurture social and intimate networks in their new communities. They form transnational families who have members with mixed-immigration statuses,...