Globalization has increased the mobility of people across national borders and this has increased the number of interracial/national couples where partners do not necessarily have the same races, citizenships, cultures or languages across the globe. When interracial/national couples (both same-sex and heterosexual) try to cross borders to put down family roots, nation states often use emotions and citizenship laws to assert their authority to control the boundaries of the population, worker movement and to protect ‘national’ culture from multiracialism. Challenges to state authority are increasing and some states respond by trying to exercise control over interracial couples by using emotions in adjudicating and authenticating love in the crackdown on supposed ‘sham’ interracial/national marriages. States do this through legal and organizational practices to constitute their emotional authority. These processes illustrate collective attitudes towards interracial couples which contain a threat of intimacy that these couples represent to the nation through an examination citizenship laws and the experiences of mixed international couples in the Republic of Ireland as a way to understand the experiences of mixed couples and families within a global context.