Lawyers as domestic counselors: Curating legitimate immigrant families

Abstract

Lawyers instruct their clients to make performative and fleeting modifications in comportment to appease judges or officers. But how do they guide their clients to routinize everyday behaviors and lifestyles seen as desirable and respectable by the state? Expanding on theories of social control, nonstate governance, and lawyering, this paper considers the role of lawyers who guide mixed-status couples applying for marriage-based green card and naturalization petitions in the United States. Interviews with immigration attorneys, paralegals, and nonprofit advocates reveal their three-step strategy to shape intimate dimensions of mixed-status couples’ lives that connote marital legitimacy. First, lawyers translate immigration law into personalized checklists that function as the blueprint of marriage that couples must follow. Then, lawyers instruct and correct their clients’ family behaviors so that they are enacted and documented in compliance with vague immigration law as interpreted by the archetypal immigration officer. Crucially, lawyers help couples routinize and painstakingly archive these curated lifestyles for ongoing adjudication. Findings suggest that nonstate actors like immigration lawyers are more than intermediaries who broker and coach; they become domestic counselors who, as indirect agents of the state, coerce subjects toward acculturation.