Description:
From 1997 to 2004, Ireland's headlines recast pregnant immigrants as "illegals" entering the country to gain legal residency through childbirth. Eithne Luibhéid offers unvarnished insight into how categories of immigrant legal status emerge and change, how sexual regimes figure in these processes, and how efforts to prevent illegal immigration redefine nationalist sexual norms and associated racial, gender, economic, and geopolitical hierarchies.
Review Quotes:
Eithne Luibhéid exquisitely details how the Irish became embroiled in a politics over the sexuality and reproduction of mainly African refugees, leading to the controversial referendum denying birthright citizenship. Pregnant on Arrival is the story of a nation of emigrants that suddenly finding itself a nation of immigrants, with a wealth of insights for anyone interested in how the law constructs the 'illegal alien' and renders pregnant mothers and their babies as threats to the nation.--Leo R. Chavez, author of The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation