Migration Categories Are Violent and Porous: Sri Lankan Migrants to Italy and Its Effect on Marriage and Intimate Relationships.

This article examines the dual nature of migration categories—specifically focusing on undocumented Sri Lankan migrants to Italy—and how these categories are both porous and violent, impacting migrants' subjectivities and family relationships. It argues that migration categories, as social constructs enforced by institutions and communities, restrict mobility and produce stigma, which in turn disrupts intimate and familial bonds through moral judgment, exclusion, and emotional strain. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a Catholic community in Wennappuwa, Sri Lanka, and Italy, the study highlights migrants' strategies to transgress legal and social boundaries, such as marriage for legal status, while also exploring how discourses on the "decline of the family" serve as mechanisms of social control and moral policing. The article situates these dynamics within broader structural conditions shaping migration, emphasizing the complex interplay between legality, identity, and community perceptions without essentializing family or migrants' experiences.