First published in Bay Windows on May 18, 2006.
According to the 2000 U.S. Census, approximately 36,000 same-sex couples are living in America where one partner is a U.S. citizen or permanent resident and the other is a foreign national. Thousands more of these binational couples had to emigrate to keep their families together. My own lover is a refugee from Africa currently living in Europe, and even with a sponsorship letter, he cannot obtain as much as a tourist visa.
I met Patrick five years ago during an overseas trip. As our love grew in the months and years that followed, he has survived a murder attempt by his family, lengthy struggles over his papers and asylum applications, unemployment and international wandering. Somehow, despite all of that, we have also known great joy. To the U.S. Government, however, our love is either invisible or a threat to homeland security.
The plight of many similar couples is documented in a report released on May 2 by Human Rights Watch and Immigration Equality entitled Family, Unvalued: Discrimination, Denial, and the Fate of Binational Same-Sex Couples under U.S. Law. Nearly 200 pages, it is available online at immigrationequality.org and hrw.org/reports/2006/us0506/, and documents a broad range of cases, including these:
After a Colombian gay rights activist writes to a guerilla group urging it to end its anti-gay violence, he receives death threats and a savage beating. His American partner helps him get a training visa to the U.S., after which they begin the lengthy, expensive process of filing an asylum claim. After doctors document the Colombian’s injuries from the beating, he is interviewed by a clearly hostile official, and weeks later receives a written “Notice of Intent to Deny” in which the word “faggot” is used without quotation marks. The decision is overturned on appeal.
A North Carolina woman’s Hungarian partner is forced to leave the country with the children both have raised. A male-to-female transgender is detained for months, housed with male prisoners, denied medication or outside contact and taunted by fellow prisoners with Buju Banton’s murderously homophobic song, “Boom Bye Bye.”
Even when couples successfully navigate the system, such as by juggling tourist and student and work visas, every plane trip risks deportation or detention. For example, an American woman’s Danish partner of nearly 18 years is detained twice while entering the U.S. to visit her. “They asked me why I was going to school, what I was doing there, if I could prove it, why I had left the states, why I was coming back … I was bombarded with questions.”
The footnotes accompanying these stories are filled with phrases like “names changed at their request,” “requested anonymity,” and “last name withheld at his request,” in order to protect the security of the interviewees. All this unavoidable secrecy is chilling in itself.
As the report shows, the recent irrational furor over immigrants is nothing new, any more than the stoking of sexual fears. In 1896, one congressman said that immigration needed to be limited “to preserve the human blood and manhood of the American character by the exclusion of depraved human beings.” In 1952, during the “red scare” period, the McCarran-Walter Act barred “aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality, epilepsy or mental defect,” and Congress made clear that this included homosexuals. The gay immigration ban was not lifted until 1990. A misguided and counterproductive ban on HIV-positive immigrants was passed in 1993 amid similar nativist hysteria, and was signed into law by President Clinton. The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) effectively excluded gay couples as families for immigration purposes.
To help end the discrimination against binational gay families, Human Rights Watch and Immigration Equality make several recommendations, including repeal of DOMA and the HIV immigration ban, and passage of the Uniting American Families Act. This bill, introduced by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), would add “permanent partner” to the classes of family members who can sponsor a foreign national for immigration to America.
We can learn from South Africa. Its Constitutional Court, in a decision last year affirming equal marriage rights, wrote, “What is at stake is not simply a question of removing an injustice experienced by a particular section of the community. At issue is a need to affirm the very character of our society as one based on tolerance and mutual respect.”
Some day America will recognize this, and will extend its longstanding policy favoring family reunification to encompass same-sex couples. But the thousands of us who are affected cannot put our lives on hold indefinitely while waiting for the light to dawn. We must summon the fortitude to carry on. Even for those whose relationships last, a great price is paid in isolation and anguish in addition to the plane tickets, phone bills and legal fees.
I dislike having to politicize the most cherished relationship of my life. I wish I could just marry Patrick and have him come live with me as he wants to do. But others who know us only as demonized abstractions have come between us, and I will not be bullied into submission. For me the stories in Family, Unvalued are not only depressing and infuriating but also inspiring. But whether our stories are comforting or discomforting, we must keep telling them and supporting groups like Human Rights Watch and Immigration Equality — and electing more politicians who defend equal immigration rights — until our homes and families are whole.