Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant

(Paperback)

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Pregnant on Arrival explores how pregnant immigrants were made into paradigmatic figures of illegal immigration, as well as the measures this characterization set into motion and the consequences for immigrants and citizens. While focusing on Ireland, Eithne Luibheid's analysis illuminates global struggles over the citizenship status of children born to immigrant parents in countries as diverse as the United States, Hong Kong, and elsewhere.

Reviews

Eithne Luibhid exquisitely details how the Irish became embroiled in a politics over the sexuality and reproduction of mainly African refugees, leading to the controversial referendum denying birthright citizenship. Pregnant on Arrival is the story of a nation of emigrants that suddenly finding itself a nation of immigrants, with a wealth of insights for anyone interested in how the law constructs the illegal alien and renders pregnant mothers and their babies as threats to the nation.Leo R. Chavez, author of The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation

Pregnant on Arrival makes an enormous, essential contribution in demonstrating how womens bodies and their sexuality become central to immigration controls. By bringing the question of queerness to bear on the threat of pregnant asylum seekers in Ireland, Luibhid charts how a queer migration framework that simultaneously attends to geopolitics, nation-building, gender, and race, can shed light on the sexual politics of determining who is a legitimate immigrant, asylum seeker, and neoliberal subject worthy of citizenship.Monisha Das Gupta, author of Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States

Author Bio

Eithne Luibhid is associate professor of gender and womens studies at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border and coeditor of Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings, both published by the University of Minnesota Press.