In Wisconsin & The Netherlands, A Couple Waits for Inclusive Immigration Reform
Posted on 05/27/2010 @ 09:50 AM
The Capital Times, in Madison, WI, profiles a local couple separated by discriminatory immigration laws.
Copyright © Photo by Mike DeVries, The Capital Times
They met when Joey came home to find Gabi – in Madison from the Netherlands for the wedding of a mutual friend – sitting on the doorstep of her east-side townhouse, where Joey was helping put up out-of-town guests.
The attraction was immediate. After Gabi headed home, the pair continued communicating by e-mail, then visited back and forth. As the relationship deepened, the couple knew they wanted to be together. They married in April in Iowa, where same-sex marriage has been legal for the past year.
Joey Johannsen recalls that she thought at first that it would be simple to have Gabi Helfert come live with her. Then she began researching the “alphabet soup” of U.S. visas (most often referred to by initials), and the realities of U.S. immigration law began to sink in. “It’s pretty complicated,” says Helfert, a German citizen who has been living the past several years in the Netherlands, where she works as a project manager at the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University.
The bottom line is this: Americans cannot sponsor a same-sex partner who is a foreigner for permanent residency in the United States, an option open to heterosexual couples in one of the least complicated and surest ways to attain the much sought “green card.” Even same-sex couples who are married do not have that right, because the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Federal law does not recognize same-sex marriages, so the immigration privileges extended to married couples do not apply.
The inability to sponsor a same-sex partner is an inequity that activists are hoping will be eradicated in any immigration reform legislation that eventually emerges in Congress. Some observers say that a provision eliminating the disparity, by injecting the controversial issue of same-sex marriage to the already controversial issue of immigration, would not likely survive what is sure to be a heated debate on immigration reform.
“I was in disbelief,” Johannsen says, of her eventual realization that there was no way for her to sponsor her partner to come to the United States permanently. “My mom asks: ‘Why doesn’t Gabi move here?’ I tell her that’s what we would love to happen.” The women juggle their schedules to fit in daily Internet video calls across an ocean and a seven-hour time difference, as they’ve researched other options.
Bi-national same-sex couples have relied on tourist visas and other temporary provisions to be together in the United States and never have had a basis to sponsor their partners, says Steve Ralls of Immigration Equality, a New York-based advocacy group focused on the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and HIV-positive communities. That’s why it is so significant that a conceptual plan for comprehensive immigration reform floated by U.S. Senate Democrats includes the core provision of the Uniting American Families Act, a bill introduced last year that would extend to same-sex couples the immigration rights afforded to married couples. “That’s a breakthrough. It is a strong signal, we believe, that the leadership is committed to including it when a bill is introduced,” says Ralls.
Pressure for immigration reform surged this spring after the passage of a controversial law in Arizona that would make failure to carry immigration papers a crime and give police broad powers to detain anyone suspected of being illegally in the country. “The Senate has realized the power the gay and lesbian grass roots movement can bring to the passage of an immigration reform bill,” Ralls says.
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Photo by Mike DeVries, The Capital Times
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