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As ‘legal’ immigrants, Mexicans with U.S. lawful permanent resident status have the rare opportunity to petition for immigrant visas for certain eligible family members. This article draws on multi-sited ethnographic research carried out over six years in Guanajuato, Mexico and Connecticut, United States, to examine the experiences of transnational mixed-status families with access to the U.S family-based immigration system. For some families, legalisation is perceived as a crucial resource. For others, legalisation poses a threat to family and community ties. Legalisation is not an inevitable or natural outcome of access to the family-based immigration system. Rather, it entails a complex process of negotiation among family members with different degrees of influence, and divergent and shifting goals. Families often find that engagements with the family immigration system yield unintended repercussions for children’s social mobility. Legalisation decisions have temporal dimensions, as intimate family decisions must be made according to a timeline imposed by U.S. immigration law. This transnational approach to mixed-status family experiences reveals that legality is a status worthy of study in its own right, and that legal statuses – while they may not be enforceable beyond the borders of the state that creates them – have power that shapes transnational family life.

Navigating legality: transnational mixed-status families and the U.S. family-based immigration system