I found a few good websites and organizations dedicated to immigration equality for the LGBT community which provides some good information for ways to try to stay or immigrate to the USA to be with their partner. Unfortunately as same-sex couples are not recognized as of yet so those immigration rights and avenues are the same as any single person wishing to immigrate to the states. Your options are basically to study, come as a tourist (but you would have to be able to prove you have good reasons to go back to your home country and having and American partner doesn't help that much), or to find a job which would sponsor you. The first two options are temporary and provide little assistance in supporting yourself and your family. Finding work in the US and convincing them to sponsor you is another can of worms that is not very easy to navigate. Of course there is also the option to enter into the green card diversity lottery every year.. but millions apply for the 50,000 spots given out annually and it really is like winning a lottery.
Other couples end up living outside of the US if they are able to. As I said in my previous post, I was lucky enough that even though both the US and Lithuania will not allow same-sex immigration, Lithuania is now part of the European Union and through this we were both able to immigrate to the UK. Reading stories of many different binational couples experiences I count my blessings that this option was available to us. While reading through these stories I noticed a particular word coming up time after time to describe these American's who had to leave the country to be with the person they loved... Exile. This term left me pretty torn as it is a word I've always associated with people who have done something wrong and are forced to leave the country. Upon entrusting this matter to the trusty old Miriam-Webster I found....
Definition of EXILE
1
a : the state or a period of forced absence from one's country or homeb : the state or a period of voluntary absence from one's country or home
The reason that all of these LGBT Americans end up going to exile is because of the lack of rights for same-sex couples. The current laws will not allow an LGBT person to sponsor their same-sex partner to join them in the states. This is down to the Defense Against Marriage Act of 1996 which states that a marriage should only be between one man and one woman. There has been some recent talks about the act being unconstitutional but that's for another post.
There are many countries, like the US, who still don't have rights for LGBT couples including immigration. This means that it could be very likely that a binational couple are from two countries without LGBT immigration rights and that couple could have no options to be together. These are the most sad stories for me to hear.
Although in some states LGBT rights are moving forward in terms of benefits, rights at work, and next of kin situations there is still so much work to be done. The subject of immigration is not necessarily in the forefront of people's minds when they think about LGBT rights but it is a very real issue for many people. I feel like it is not something I've been involved enough in because I am not in the states. This got me thinking about so many other couples that have moved to countries where they can be with their partners, countries that most likely have civil partnerships or same-sex marriage and LGBT immigration rights. Living in the UK allows me to sometimes hide in a place where I do have equal rights and forget that there is so much work to be done back home. This also made me think that this makes this minority group even further underrepresented as a good portion of the LGBT binational population are either non-citizens or are living outside of the US.
As I mentioned earlier, I found some good resources online (which I'll list at the end of this post) and on one website I found a documentary that has been 10 years in the works. It is called Entry Denied and is the story of 3 LGBT binational couples over the period of 10 years and the struggles that they have had to go through. I'm very interested in seeing this once it's completed and hope that it brings some much needed awareness to this topic.
So here are a few sites that I found in my search for information about LGBT immigration rights. (I'll also put these in the "Blogs and other sites" tab at the top of my blog.
Thanks for your time and I welcome any feedback!
What a great article! You make me proud.
ReplyDeleteI look forward to watching the documentary as well.