Eithne Luibhéid’s book Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (2002) is part of the definitive scholarship on gender, sexuality and immigration law. Luibhéid, director of the Committee on LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona and an associate professor in the department of women’s studies, was in Chicago April 21 to present ‘Sexuality, Migration, and the Shifting Line between Legal and Illegal Status’ at DePaul University. The work is part of a forthcoming special issue of the journal GLQ, titled Queer/Migration, edited by Luibhéid.

Ireland, like the United States, has been one of the few countries to grant automatic birth citizenship. In 2004, a public referendum, passed by 80 percent of the population who voted, supported amending the Constitution so that children of parents who were both non-nationals would no longer be constitutionally entitled to Irish citizenship, even if they were born in Ireland. The Constitution was subsequently changed to reflect the referendum.

According to Luibhéid, this significant change occurred in the context of an influx of workers into Ireland’s neoliberal ‘knowledge economy,’ designed to prioritize technologically trained immigrants and guest workers while excluding those who brought fewer such skills or sought asylum because they were prosecuted on the grounds of factors like religious identity or political opinion. Luibhéid focused on the figure of the ‘child-bearing asylum seeker’ who, according to her, was used by Irish politicians to whip up fears about fraudulent immigrants who, according to them, lied about their need for asylum and/or deliberately gave birth in Ireland to gain citizenship. Politicians also asserted a definite link between the rise in the numbers of undocumented immigrants in Ireland and the supposedly larger numbers of fraudulent asylum cases. According to Luibhéid, that link is unsubstantiated.

For Luibhéid, it’s no accident that these asylum seekers should be mostly people of color from the global south; she argued that the change in the law came about as a distinct and relatively new attempt to police Irish borders and further define its national identity. She stated it shows a ‘connection between nation-building and heterosexuality’ within ‘hegemonic hetero-regimes’ that emphasized and heterosexual reproduction as long as it occurred within economic privilege. She contextualized the growth of asylum seekers in a system of world-wide ‘debt displacement’ that creates economic and cultural hardships and asserted that ‘immigration [law] controls the national through the global in a manner that perpetuates neo-colonial inequalities.’