ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which UK immigration policies have influenced migrants' constructions of their families in the UK, and discuss how UK welfare policies can be insensitive to the cultural divergence of family structures and practices. It pays close attention to the ways in which state policies have constructed citizens as gendered subjects, colluding with patriarchy and helping to reproduce 'traditional' gender roles and patterns of gendered power in the family. Marriage migration is practised by all of Britain's South Asian populations, but is most common among British Pakistanis, for whom immigration policies consequently continue to have disproportionate importance. The chapter presents a case study of a transmigrant Pakistani family living in London. It provides an illustrative discussion of how family structure in the UK is rooted in the migration process and how the process of family constitution has been manipulated by the British state's immigration policies; with consequent implications for welfare.
