Immigration barriers hurt gay couples
By Deb Price / The Detroit News from the Web, March 23, 2005
Playing together in a women's rollerblade hockey league in Virginia, Donna Myers and Maria Barquero suddenly discovered they shared a big problem:
They were perfect for each other
They're born nesters who want nothing more than to settle down with another lovebird and raise a flock of children.
They value education and professional careers. And they've got the sparkling resumes to prove it.
But their joy at having found the perfect mate was clouded from the get-go by the realization that one thing they didn't share could tear them apart -- matching passports.
Myers is American. Barquero is Costa Rican.
When Barquero's work visa expired in 2003 after she'd spent 13 years in the United States working and getting a college education, the couple's life was thrown into turmoil.
Out went the good-paying jobs and health care. Those became luxuries, abandoned in favor of catch-as-catch-can jobs that give more flexibility for a relationship now built around airports, tourist visas and e-mail.
"I knew we were right for each other," says Myers, 30, who gave up a $66,000-a-year job as a federal consumer safety officer to be able to spend more of the year in Costa Rica.
"I also knew the risk -- that there could be a lot of heartache. I realized what a pickle we were in."
Barquero, 35, who recently visited Myers' family farm in Maryland where they hope one day to live together, calls the life they cobble together "limbo land."
If the United States were as family-friendly as many of its allies, this story would already have a happy ending because Myers would be sponsoring Barquero for U.S. citizenship, and they'd be able to focus on starting their family.
(Myers wants to be the stay-at-home mom.) But, tragically, U.S. immigration laws don't yet recognize that some Americans who fall in love with foreigners are gay -- and family reunification rules should help them, too.
Determined to play by the rules, Myers and Barquero are among the gay couples suing Maryland for the right to marry.
But even if the women do wed in Massachusetts, Canada or, eventually, Maryland, a 1996 law -- absurdly entitled the Defense of Marriage Act -- prohibits the federal government from recognizing gay marriages.
So they still wouldn't qualify as spouses eligible for help in keeping their relationship together.
They aren't alone: The 2000 U.S. Census reveals that 6 percent of all gay couples include one
noncitizen. A great many couples opted not to disclose their relationships.
But of those who did, 35,820 couples reported one partner is a foreigner. And if the foreigner is not a permanent legal U.S. resident, there's a shadow over the relationship because involuntary separation always looms.
The discriminatory rules hit Latinos especially hard: 40 percent of mixed-passport couples say the foreign partner is Mexican.
The United States trails the 16 countries that welcome their gay citizens' partners:
Australia, Belgium (which legalized gay marriage in 2003), Brazil, Canada (which legalized gay marriage in 2003), Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Israel, the Netherlands (which in 2001 was the first nation to legalize gay marriage), New Zealand, Norway, South Africa (which in 1996 became the first country to write a ban on anti-gay discrimination into its Constitution), Sweden and the United Kingdom.
Myers and Barquero desperately hope the United States will soon catch up. The Permanent Partners Immigration Act, to be reintroduced this spring, would allow unmarried U.S. citizens (or ones Uncle Sam doesn't recognize as married) to sponsor their partners for immigration privileges by meeting the same tough standards of emotional and financial commitment now required for married heterosexuals.
(For information to contact your members of Congress, go to hrc.org.)
Couples who yearn to build a stable life together deserve government encouragement.
Love shouldn't be forced to live out of a suitcase.
You can reach Deb Price at (202) 906-8205 or dprice@detnews.com.
Article published in the NJ Home News Tribune 3-22-05 under “Restrictive immigration rules strain gay couple’s relationship.”
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