“We asked for workers. We got people instead.” It has been a long time since the Swiss novelist Max Frisch [1965] thus reframed the movements that pulled waves of immigrants into European post-war reconstruction and the ensuing economic growth. With this famous and evocative phrase he captured the unintentional evolution of migratory processes, that is, the limited role that the market and productive forces in fact play in instigating and governing human mobility. Several generations later, indeed, migration studies have come to include personal bonds and social capital as crucial, inescapable dimensions for explaining the self-sustaining character of migratory flows, recognizing that interpersonal relationships and social networks operate as independent drivers of individual and collective international movementsFootnote ¹. This perspective has gained even more analytical and political importance in a global context of restrictive migration politics, making marriage and family bonds – along with asylum requests – the main approaches for requesting visas or legalizing foreign legal status. A more recent line of research explores in more detail how intimate and personal relationships underlie and shape people’s horizons of spatial mobility. These studies not only shed new light on the classic family and migration nexusFootnote ², but also critically reveal how mobility and intimacy become more and more intertwined the more restrictive state sovereignty and citizenship, and consequently border politics, become.

The two books I discuss in this review—Transnational marriage and partner migration: Constellations of security, citizenship and rights edited by Anne-Marie D’Aoust (hereafter Constellations) and Argonauts of West Africa: Unauthorized migration and kinship dynamics in a changing Europe by Apostolos Andrikopoulos (hereafter Argonauts)—contribute significantly to this debate by offering a thoughtful conception of the ways in which migrants, on a global scale, reinvent intimacy and creatively manipulate identity boundaries in search of mobility, rights and social opportunities. Together, these volumes cover a large part of the world. While Argonauts retraces trajectories spanning West Africa (Nigeria and Ghana in particular) and northern and south-eastern Europe, the chapters edited by D’Aoust refer mainly to the Global North, from Japan to Canada, northern European countries and the United States, collecting migrant voices from Korea and Vietnam, the Philippines and Iran, Brazil, India and Mexico.

Overall, these studies present an insightful interdisciplinary understanding of the mechanisms through which, on one hand, state surveillance brings migrant identities and intentions under scrutiny with the aim of discriminating between those who do and those who do not deserve to reside on national soil. It does so by delving deep into foreigners’ intimate lives through increasing policing and bureaucratic measures. On the other hand, the ethnographic lens largely adopted by these studies captures the myriad relationships, exchanges, identity camouflaging and intimate politics through which migrants “work” borders and forms of belonging in order to expand their spaces of mobility and acquire civic rights. The main analytical contribution offered by an intersectional reading of these two books is a thoughtful, interdisciplinary understanding of the consequences of the increased politicization of family migration in the private spheres of individuals and the regimentation of collective conceptions of love, intimacy and relatedness. All these analyses, although taking different approaches and perspectives, focus on the tensions between the universal right to be a mobile subject but also have a family, on one hand, and state ambitions to monitor borders and govern the reproduction of the population, on the other. Both books set out to examine this tension, albeit from different angles.

Constellations explores the ways in which the state, through its laws, officials and procedures, shapes the nation-building project by targeting family formations, stressing the distinction between proper and improper subjects. Marriage emerges as the pivotal bond that specifically catalyzes state scrutiny, with its insistence on discriminating between real and sham conjugal unions. All of the studies collected in the D’Aoust volume illustrate the ways migrant couples—be they mixed, transnational, or cross-border, as they are portrayed according to different approachesFootnote ³—are framed and addressed as a matter of public interest. The ways in which migrants pair up, either with each other or with citizens, their economic and legal status, the civic rights they obtain through marriage, how they are supposed to love, enact gender roles or follow cultural norms, the households they set up, their fertility choices and the kin they link together, all these dimensions are targeted as objects of government inasmuch as they are considered a potential threat to national sovereignty, demography and identity.

The chapters of Constellations alternate analyses of different juridical systems, their executive proceedings, and migrants’ stories and narratives. Dutch policies (chapter by Betty De Hart) and the Franch parliamentary debate on family migration (Saskia Bonjour and Massilia Ourabah) are considered in a historical perspective, while a comparative approach is used to review spousal migration laws in France, the United Kingdom, Denmark and the United States (Helena Wray). These analyses clearly highlight the ways in which migrant marriages and families have become increasingly politicized, and now constitute an area of close state scrutiny. At a different, more minute level, other chapters of Constellations reconstruct the logic of deservingness through which marriage and family migration are allowed or impeded. These studies examine how such policies are enforced by a plurality of subjects and entities acting at different institutional levels. Indeed, officials, lawyers, translators, brokers and street-level bureaucrats represent the gears of selective, stratified national regimes that distribute or deter statuses and rights. Intimate stories and narratives are selected through the filters of these procedural systems, to be transformed into circulable texts (entextualization) pursuing aims of veracity (chapter by Mieke Vandenbroucke); or into measurable, objective facts for use by lawyers, who end up playing political (Anne-Marie D’Aoust) and bureaucratic roles (Laura Odasso and Manuela Salcedo Robledo) more than those of advocates. These chapters alternate with others that reconstruct subjects’ maneuvering within labyrinthine jurisdictions and bureaucratic tangles, the creative solutions they formulate and the unintentional consequences they encounter in their efforts to attain family and mobility rights (chapters by Grace K. Tran and Eithne Luibhéid). The chapter by Rhacel Salazar Parreñas is particularly effective in this regard as it shows how the intersection of state family politics and migrant strategies may end up queering conjugality. A case in point is provided by Filipina hostesses in Japan pursuing their goal of marrying a citizen. This goal may be ingeniously achieved also by transgender hostesses even though the Japanese legal system only permits marriage for straight couples. Finally, these analyses shed light on the ways migrants and their partners conceive of belonging, safety and justice, and how these conceptions are interwoven with emotions, as well as moral and affective bonds. In the end, as D’Aoust acutely observes in her introduction, by adopting a multifocal approach that encompasses the state, its executors and migrants it becomes clear that security, citizenship and rights delineate relational “constellations” of power. Far from being static, such constellations are based on movement and their features depend on the gaze of the viewers who navigate through them.

Adopting the same semantics, Andrikopoulos’s ethnography portrays the West African migrants who navigate difficult and even dark circumstances as “argonauts,” circumventing borders and reinterpreting the rules to reach—and remain in—Europe. His focus is on kinship and the ways kin relationships play a pivotal role in this process, as they deploy networks through which people move and obtain the documents they need to legalize their status (visas, work permits, residence permits and passports). This requires being able to travel, work and access civic rights. By focusing on marriage and siblinghood, Andrikopoulos reveals how kinship represents the vessel by which migration, understood as navigation through governmental gears, is made possible. However, his analysis also reveals that kinship is itself a troubled sea of relationships that need to be acknowledged and handled with care in order to move successfully along the migratory trajectory. From this perspective, Andrikopoulos engages with recent approaches to kinship that theorize it in terms of relatednessFootnote ⁴ and the mutuality of beingFootnote ⁵, regardless of whether the kin bonds are biological or social. As he stresses, however, relatedness and mutuality represent only the bright side of relational processes; such processes are essentially much more ambiguous and slippery. The life stories comprising this ethnography demonstrate, indeed, that trust, solidarity and loyalty are relational features that cannot be taken for granted: the interpersonal bonds these migrants assemble in the name of kinship along their mobility routes can easily weaken or even turn into exploitive, predatory relationships.

Argonauts carries out its analysis by reconstructing the identity-crafting work migrants perform to take on a suitable identity, one that will enable them to obtain legal, social and economic rights. Specifically, Andrikopoulos focuses on two interrelated practices that play a crucial role in this: “identity loan” and “kinning.” Identity loan, for example, in the Dutch context, involves unauthorized migrants borrowing documents and personal information from another (legal) migrant, mainly in order to be able to work in the country’s strictly regulated labour market. This practice may have unpredictable consequences in that the life events and social relationships that emerge from it may survive the short-term work that was the original aim to the point that individuals may be forced to juggle multiple different selves, sometimes even over a long period. “Kinning” is thus crucial while migrants need to connect their person—their specific body, life, and manners—in a meaningful way with the identity they have borrowed. Drawing on adoption studies, kinning may thus be understood in terms of the array of acts and meanings through which kinship relationships are produced and made to have effective consequences, starting from the individual identity—and relative ID documents—that they engender. Such a practice is related to the construction of brotherhood and sisterhood, that is, the intimate, trust-based connections subjects need to build in order to make document exchanges effective and safe. Andrikopoulos refers mainly to kinning practices in relation to identity loans; however, it seems to me that they can also be related to the other highly sought-after relationship used to obtain papers, that is, again, marriage. In this vein, Argonauts also exhaustively reconstructs how the conjugal arena has been crafted over time, molding preferences and matches according to gender interplay, legal status and the need to avoid state scrutiny that marrying one or another candidate implies. What the search for a good marriage produces is, indeed, an array of practices, values and relationships that in the end weave relatedness, as Andrikopoulos shows with the story of Kyriaki and Frank [127–141]. In conclusion, as Andrikopoulos stresses, quoting GoffmanFootnote ⁶, the roles these migrants enact do not mask the “true person,” rather they make persons. In light of an Igbo proverb cited in Argonauts the world therefore appears to be a “dancing masquerade that you cannot understand if you remain standing in one place” [37]. Again, as in the constellation perspective suggested by D’Aoust, movement and multifocality pivot the epistemic frame. In this way not only do such processes become intelligible, but assumptions about identity and boundaries also become blurred.

A cross-reading of Constellations and Argonauts provides a wealth of research insights that are connected to each other and open up fruitful, interdisciplinary standpoints on the ways in which intimacy, kinship and the state are intertwined under regimes of restricted mobility and identity policies. Among the several research lines traced by these books, two, in my opinion, are particularly fruitful. First, a central topic that emerges from all of these analyses is marriage and how conjugal agreements with citizens or denizens can represent a key means by which unauthorized migrants may legalize their position. In this regard, all these studies demonstrate the weakness of any understanding of marriage choices based on the opposition between sham and love unions, fake and real couples, and genuine and ill intentions. These scholars call into question the notion of intimacy understood as “pure relationships”Footnote ⁷, entailing a supposed untainted sphere of affinity, romantic bonds and generosity detached from material, pragmatic and opportunistic needs. As ZelizerFootnote ⁸ conversely established when reasoning about the social value of money—and as both Andrikopoulos and Parreñas reiterate in their book and chapter, respectively—the strength of personal relationships is based precisely on the entanglement of interests and emotions, recognized as interrelated, basic and undeniable dimensions of existence. Adopting these lenses, the various life stories comprising Constellations and Argonauts clearly reveal the emotional and moral load borne by subjects when they wed for convenience, be they sponsors or beneficiaries. The narratives through which subjects explain the utilitarian reasons for their marriage decisions are, in fact, always signified with ethical dilemmas and affective concerns. On the other hand, it is worth stressing that marriage is always a contract and public event, with institutional, political consequences. Such consequences involve multiple intersecting social spheres, from couple formation and the decision to marry to the family and kinship structures generated and the legal status accorded to individuals by the state in recognizing the marriage as valid. In this view, marriage practices, from courtship rituals to the wedding and future destiny of the couple, require a magistral performance of roles based on moral contents, emotional participation and the organization of the celebration itself, even when the conjugal agreement is based on a mere exchange of money for documents. Paradoxically, the more such an agreement is fundamental for regularizing one’s legal status, the more detailed the romantic mis-en-scene needs to be—as Grace Tran makes clear in her chapter in Constellations—with the effect of reinforcing the white middle-class idea of a love marriage by mimicking it.

These essays thus highlight a second line of analysis. The ambivalent relationship that, through marriage, entwines love and bureaucracy, social security and personal networks, brings to the fore citizenship and kinship as a critical nexus of inquiry. According to classical sociology and structural-functionalist theories of social change in particular, citizenship and kinship are conceived as opposite forms of membership: in this perspective, pre-modern societies ascribe identity through lineage and kinship, while modern ones constitute it through national associations of enfranchised individuals recognized as citizens, bearers of the applicable rights, obligations and duties. Specifically, as Parsons theorized, modernity is constructed on the basis of individual freedom and personal autonomy, that is, a dismissal of the ascriptive, compulsory roles and expectations understood to constitute the structural pillars of previous social ordersFootnote ⁹. There has been a vibrant discussion of this conceptual framework, which continues to be a subject of heated debate. A significant line of criticism, and one inherent in this book review, is fostered by reconceptualizing national regimes as neither egalitarian nor universalistic but rather based on exclusive membershipFootnote ¹⁰, civic stratificationFootnote ¹¹ and the proliferation of boundariesFootnote ¹². According to this view, kinship, far from losing relevance, retains a crucial role in anchoring and shaping national identity and belonging: not only are the loyalties of citizens to the state and the us/insiders vs. them/outsiders distinction made meaningful and heartfelt by invoking family bonds (fatherland, motherland, national sibling), but also and most importantly ancestry—through blood law—remains a basic, if not prevailing, criterion of citizenship transmission and recognitionFootnote ¹³. Constellations and Argonauts contribute significantly to this debate in that, with the variety of ethnographies they offer, they show how mobile subjects participate in this process from below, through marriage alliances and kinship politics. Migrants’ points of view on citizenship and kinship as interrelated domains makes clear that the more citizenship operates as an exclusionary tool, the more kinship acquires value as a field of relationships, exchange and belonging. In this regard, Audrey Macklin with her epilogue-chapter to Constellations keenly argues that “if the nation had to compete with the family for the citizen’s loyalty, the nation may not win” [263]. Most importantly, Macklin reasons that when state surveillance addresses the family as an object of government, it reawakens politics that are implicitly eugenic. Indeed, the regulation of migrants’ marriages represents a biopolitics through which not only their intimacy and family formations are constrained, but reproduction is prevented, “undesirable” offspring are limited, and the composition of the national population is preserved.