Family ideation, immigration, and the racial state: explaining divergent family reunification policies in Britain and the US.

Why do family reunification policies differ across liberal democracies? Established literature explains differentiation through reference to the logics of distinct "national models" of immigration policy-making. Drawing on critical race and feminist scholarship, this paper finds consistent racial logics in the political histories of family reunification policies in Britain and the US during the mid-twentieth century. In a context where the geopolitical power of each country was conditioned by an assertive antiracist internationalism, "family" provided a colourblind, ideational platform to rearticulate the state-based racial project of white supremacy. Despite an original convergence, family reunification diverged because of the context-specific racialization of the immigrant family in each case. In rooting divergent reunification policies in the logics of the racial state, this paper contributes to efforts to incorporate race into the sociology of immigration. The paper also develops recent feminist scholarship on the role of "family ideation" in building liberaldemocratic immigration systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]