Co-constructions of family and belonging in the politics of family migration

All nation-states across the globe acknowledge family ties as a ground for the admission of foreigners and in the OECD, family migration is the largest migration category by far. Therefore, the question which relationships qualify as ‘family’ in migration policy is key to defining who gets to migrate legally. These conceptions of who and what counts as ‘family’ and who gets to have ‘family’ vary across the globe and change over time: they are subject to political struggle and shaped by intersections of ethnicity and race, gender, sexuality, and class. Thus, family migration politics revolve around the question which families ‘belong’: which families love, marry, have sex, and parent “properly” and which do not. This chapter presents a survey of how families and belonging are co-constructed in family migration policies across the world.