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Julie Kruse is the Policy Director at Immigration Equality, a national org that is working to gain equal immigration rights for the LGBT and HIV-positive community. She has written this guest post for the Blend. (Photo of Kruse by Judy C. Rolfe)
There’s a battle looming for LGBT families that we can win now – a battle to keep lesbians and gays from literally being torn from our same-sex partners. Discriminatory immigration laws are causing LGBT families needless suffering.In April, Shirley Tan of Pacifica, Calif., as reported in a recent People magazine article, was facing deportation and forced separation from her partner Jaylynn, who is a U.S. citizen, and their two U.S. citizen children. Just days before her scheduled deportation, Sen. Diane Feinstein introduced a private bill on her behalf, which effectively delays the deportation for almost two years.
Gordon Stewart has moved to England to stay with his life partner Renato. Because of being abroad, he was not able to spend the time caring for a sister sick with cancer, as he had hoped to do.
Judy Rickard retired early to be with her partner, Karen, and move abroad, if necessary, to keep their family together.
In short, the 36,000 bi-national lesbian, gay and bisexual families in the U.S. face acute crises every day because discriminatory immigration laws prevent them from sponsoring their same-sex partners for residency in the U.S.
Finally, after years of struggle to fix this injustice, we have a shot at winning this fight, but it will require our community to take action.
CONGRESS AND THE White House are committed to moving forward with comprehensive immigration reform. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), chair of the subcommittee charged with overseeing immigration, recently said that he will have a bill ready for consideration by Labor Day. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has promised, once the Senate votes on its version, to bring a similar measure to a vote in her chamber, too.
The White House held a summit in June and formed an immigration working group to help move comprehensive immigration reform legislation forward. And President Obama has said he supports our inclusion in the bill.
Now, the LGBT community is at a significant tipping point to ensure inclusion of our families in this legislation.
More below the fold.
In June, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, held the first-ever hearing on the issue of lesbian, gay and bisexual bi-national couples. Leahy, along with Schumer, has expressed strong support for including those couples and the Uniting American Families Act – a bill to treat all couples, straight or gay, equally under U.S. immigration law – in the larger comprehensive immigration reform bill.Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) also said, in a recent statement to Immigration Equality, that, “One of the cruelest aspects of American immigration policy is the separation it imposes on people who love each other, but happen to be from different countries. … I am a supporter of comprehensive reform and believe that any comprehensive immigration reform package must include UAFA, too.”
Including our families in comprehensive immigration reform, if successful, will not only be a watershed moment for couples impacted directly by discriminatory immigration policies. It also will be an important accomplishment for the community as a whole. If LGBT voters bring new support to a large, comprehensive bill, we also bring credibility to other fights that impact our families, too. That’s why it is so important that our community support comprehensive immigration reform and urge Congress to pass an inclusive reform package that benefits us.
Comprehensive immigration reform will not be easy. Previous attempts to pass such legislation have failed. But, if LGBT voters can bring our champions to the table in support of an inclusive bill this time, we have a chance of making a real difference not just for our families, but for every family suffering under the current immigration system.
There is a real opportunity, right now, to score a legislative victory. Doing so will require enthusiastic support from each of us, and calls to our lawmakers insisting that no reform is truly comprehensive unless it includes our families, too. That, in turn, creates momentum for equality that our entire community, regardless of whether or not we are part of a bi-national couple, can benefit from.
Ms. Kruse heads Immigration Equality’s Washington, D.C., office, where she works to advance the rights of LGBT and HIV-positive immigrants and their families and to create fully inclusive comprehensive immigration reform. She leads the national effort to pass the Uniting American Families Act. Ms. Kruse holds a Master’s in Education degree from Northwestern University. She has over 15 years of experience working for LGBT, immigrant, and women’s rights and economic justice, including serving as Interim Director of Legislative Affairs for Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, Director of Advocacy and Strategic Partnerships at the Center for Economic Progress, and as Vice President of Chicago Women in Trades. She worked with two Chicago-based Latino community programs and taught high school in Nicaragua. Ms. Kruse led the national Immigrant Taxpayer Working Group and chaired the Employment and Pay Equity Working Group of the Illinois Governor’s Commission on the Status of Women. E-mail jkruse at immigrationequality dot org
17 Comments
This is something…That we sometimes forget about. So many couples are denied the chance to be together here because a US citizen can’t sponsor his/her same-sex spouse. This is brutally unfair and needs to end ASAP.
Support Comprehensive Immigration Reform!!!Hopefully the majority of the LGBT community will be support an inclusive CIR. Any LGBT persons not supporting immigration reform because it doesn’t “apply” to them is in the same warped state of mind as “those” LGBT that consistently vote GOP; you are voting against your own right.
In fairness…How many other countries allow their citizens to sponsor a same sex partner from the US?
Immigration usually has some level of receprocity to it?
I suspectthat most LGBT Americas don’t feel like they have much invested in any part of CIR. Remember, some are not big fans of immigrants.
I hope that the legislation passes, but I would not be surprised to see apathy from most LGBT Americans (especially considering the level of apathy directed at issues that DO involve them).
In fairness…if you’re going to raise an undermining question like that, the burden is on you to provide evidence that other counties don’t allow American s-s partners residency. Many countries have national recognition of s-s relationships, whether in the form of civil marriage or ‘marriage by another name’.
this is excellent news.this matter strikes close to home for me, being half of a bi-national couple. my members of congress already support uafa. now i need to get on the horn and be sure they’re behind this current strategy.
I agree with youBut that is the point of the article. Most LGBT people that have not had to deal with the American immigration system are unaware that their is a LGBT dimension to immigration. If it does not effect them personally, does that mean that they shouldn’t support immigration reform? I personally have no stake in DADT, yet I am supportive of its repeal.
The bigger picture is that this is one of the +1100 federal marriage rights that are denied to us. By achieving one federal marriage right we are slowly chipping away at the discrimination that effects the whole LGBT community. And for that reason the LGBT community should be pushing for immigration reform. The fact that the federal government could soon have legislation that would recognize a same-sex relationship has enormous implications.
well stated!
IN SUMMARY:
UAFA Essential for our CommunityI am a gay American with a partner who lives in Venezuela. He is an engineer specializing in Industrial Instrumentation, and a musical performer. He comes from a solid middle class family in Maracaibo. He is a kind, intelligent and decent person. We have been trying to get him into the USA for nearly 4 years now and each time the State Department denies him a visa of any type, even a simple tourist visa. He has made a dozen trips from his home, at great expense, nine hours on the bus each way, to go to the US Embassy in Caracas. He has taken tests, submitted countless documents, and waited, and waited. All to no effect..His visa has been denied four times.
Now as I understand it, if we were an opposite sex couple, it is likely he would have been here long ago and our pain and loneliness ended. In fact, opposite sex couples don’t even have to be married, they must merely state their intention to be married, and a visa may be granted. But the US does not view me as a citizen deserving of equal rights…so I cannot sponsor into the US the person I love. I feel the anguish of being a second-class citizen every day we are apart. It grieves me that my own country treats me with such wanton cruelty. This is not an issue of gay marriage, but only allowing people who love one another to simply be together.
I began to have some new hope with the introduction of the Uniting American Families Act, but this simple act is stalled in Congress…as the years of our lives slip away. And what is holding it back from passage? Nothing more than fear and apathy. I view the government’s discrimination against my lover and me as a stain on the national honor, and a personal insult. Many countries provide for their gay and lesbian citizens to sponsor their loved one for immigration purposes. Why must we always be so far behind when it comes to matters of simple equality? We, the People of the United States of America are supposed to be at the forefront of freedom’s march, not sweeping up behind.
I urge the new administration and Congress to act on this legislation without further delay. There must be some piece of legislation it can attached to without too much controversy. It has been languishing in the Congress for too long as our lives and hope for happiness slip away.
When I was a child in school we had to learn the poem of Emma Lazarus which graces the Statue of Liberty-
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Sadly, for gay Americans and the ones they love born abroad, those words have become a cruel joke.
In fairness, I will grantthat it is unlikely in any of the African and Middle Eastern countries which imprison or execute LGBT people. So by “number” of countries, we’re looking to ally ourselves with such bastions of civil rights as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, and Zimbabwe. Yay, us.
Dude. So you don’t have any interest or empathy for others.We get it, already.
I’ve got my fingers crossed for you.Now hopefully there will be some way to recognize marriages, domestic partnerships, civil unions, and designated beneficiaries for this–as well as whatever non-marriage-name gets cooked up in the future.
We aim high here in the USYet, we’re supposed to be an advanced nation that’s all about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”?
any peep from obama?he infamously helped defeat uafa when he was a senator, saying he supported it in theory but the legislation was prone to abuse (which was hogwash). so, will he be pressuring congress to keep this out of the comprehensive immigration legislation, or pressuring them to strip it if it does make it in?
You have to ask?I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count. (Hint: the words “political capital” and Rahm Emanuel will be involved.)
consider the question rhetorical, lol!