In the 1990s, Ireland became transformed from a nation drained by centuries of emigration into what U.S. investment firm Morgan Stanley dubbed the “Celtic Tiger,” a destination that was sought out by migrants from around the world.¹ They included not only workers from the European Union (EU), United States, Asia, and elsewhere but also asylum seekers who were often from West Africa and Eastern Europe. Asylum seekers are migrants who gain admission on the grounds that they fear persecution. This book focuses on the Irish government’s and public’s responses to pregnant asylum seekers who acquired legal residency by giving birth...

National, colonial, and racial relationships have historically depended on discourses about women’s sexed bodies to establish hierarchies of differences. Actual women’s bodies were often studied, exhibited, or otherwise used to affirm and naturalize these hierarchies.¹ One of the most infamous examples of a woman whose body was used in these ways was Saartjie, or Sarah, Baartman, a young Khoisan woman from Southern Africa who was exhibited in Europe between 1810 and 1815.² She was exhibited particularly so that Europeans could gaze upon her buttocks and genitalia, which were primary sites used by scientists at the time to establish racial and...

Minister for justice john o’donoghue’s remarks, analyzed in chapter 1, reflect the viewpoint of global northern state officials who consider unauthorized human migration across international borders to be a very serious problem. The remarks also reflect and further contribute to the framing of childbearing migrants, especially asylum seekers, as “really” illegal migrants who are cynically exploiting the system for their own gain. According to the minister, this necessitated further efforts to criminalize them.

Catherine Dauvergne captures the paradox that faces states when they try to reduce illegal migration primarily through expanded criminalization: “Each extension of the law regulating migration increases...

This chapter describes the emergence of the direct provision and dispersal systems through which asylum seekers are provided with lodging, food, and health care while waiting for their asylum claims to be decided. Unlike the regular welfare system, direct provision does not seek to produce entrepreneurial, self-governing subjects for the neo-liberal nation-state; rather, it seeks to deter asylum seekers from arriving, and to ensure that those who do arrive remain strictly controlled, contained, and effectively incapacitated. In this way, asylum seekers can more readily be made illegal and deportable after their claims are denied, as happens in the vast majority...

In january 2002 Ms. I.A.O., a thirty-two-year-old Nigerian citizen, made headlines in Ireland when she appealed to the High Court to prevent her deportation to Nigeria on the ground that she was pregnant. Her solicitor, deploying pro-life rhetoric, claimed that her deportation contravened Article 40.3.3 of the Irish Constitution, which guarantees that the Irish State will “defend and vindicate” the “right to life of the unborn.”¹ Ms. O had entered Ireland in December 1999, claiming asylum on the basis that she feared her life would be in danger if she returned to Nigeria. An official who interviewed her judged her...

In march 2004 the minister for justice announced that voters would be asked to amend the constitution by removing the automatic entitlement to citizenship for any child born in Ireland, north or south. Newborn children who did not have at least one parent who was an Irish citizen, who was entitled to Irish citizenship, or who had resided legally in Ireland for three of the last four years would no longer acquire citizenship at birth. The targets of the proposed amendment were migrants, although their children were most directly affected. Migrants were targeted because “there has been no significant diminution...

This book has tracked how pregnancy and migrant status became interwoven through panics over illegal immigration that expanded the numbers of migrants who would become designated as illegal while at the same time refashioning social, economic, and geopolitical hierarchies. This chapter argues that struggles over migrant pregnancies were part of a wider constellation of conflicts over migrant sexualities and intimacies that, although distinct in important ways, were nonetheless linked through their antagonistic relationship to nationalist hetero-normativity. First I describe what happened to migrant parents with citizen children after the passage of the citizenship referendum. Next I briefly discuss other conflicts...

Judith butler calls for scholarship and activisms “focused on opposition to state violence and its capacity to produce, exploit, and distribute precarity for the purposes of profit and territorial defense.”¹ As she describes and as this book demonstrates, effective opposition requires “thinking sexual politics along with immigration politics in new ways.”² Thus, this concluding chapter first brings the book’s arguments together by reviewing how pregnancy became the basis for claiming that certain migrants were “illegal” and then implementing laws and policies that made them so. Second, this chapter addresses how the production of the figure of the illegal migrant is...