Trapped in Bureaucratic Formalities: Discredit, Grievances, and Rights Claims of Migrantized Citizens and Their Partners in Europe

Odasso, Laura

Scholarship has highlighted the spillover effects of restrictive migration policies and their implementation, which primarily target non-citizens but also impact national citizens. In practice, such migration policies can effectively "migrantize" citizens. This is particularly evident in cases involving marriage migration, especially within mixed-status unions. Couples consisting of one third-country national and one citizen of a European country serve as a key family configuration for examining how migration policies affect both migrants and non-migrants.

Building on this observation and drawing from scholarship on the politics of belonging, intimate citizenship, and family migration, this paper aims to demonstrate how the administrative limbo associated with marriage migration policies jeopardizes the citizenship of national partners and hinders the integration of foreign partners in mixed-status unions, while paradoxically raising their legal awareness and rights consciousness.

Based on extensive qualitative fieldwork conducted with such couples, as well as legal intermediaries, both in situ and online, in France, Italy, and Belgium since the 2010s, the paper offers a dual analysis of administrative limbo:

An intersectional analysis that addresses the discrediting of citizens based on their origin, gender, and social class in relation to the background of their foreign partner, and examines the bureaucratic consequences in terms of bureaucratic and biographical temporality.
An analysis of infrapolitics and intimate citizenship that explores the asymmetrical agency of partners trapped in administrative limbo, focusing on individual and collective grievances as well as family rights claims.

These perspectives on administrative limbo represent facets of the same phenomenon of precarious entry into the nation. Strikingly, they do not contradict one another but coexist within the lived experiences of mixed-status couples in Europe.