by Amos Lim
Last week, the U.S. began offering "deferred action" for undocumented immigrants who came to this country before the age of 16 and are currently under the age of 31. This group, often referred to as DREAMers (as they were the proponents of the DREAM Act legislation that failed to pass Congress in 2010) will now be allowed to apply for "deferred action", which would mean that they can live and work in America without fear of deportation for a period of two years. Out4Immigration has always counted the DREAMers as our allies in our fight for equal immigration rights and the right for the American citizens among us to be able to sponsor our partners for green cards. Some people believe the DREAMers are getting treated better than us, but that is not the point. This is.
The immigration system in the United States is
broken. Immigration has always been used politically to stop groups of
people from coming in, whether it was the Chinese Exclusion Act in the
late 1800s/early 1900s or the Homosexual and/or HIV Travel Ban (yes,
there was once a law in this country that banned homosexuals from entering). These past - and present - exclusionary policies result in ugly rhetoric. And corporate media, which is frequently lazy, will repeat what is told to them without fact checking.
I'm not an immigration attorney - just
someone who has been in this fight for a long time with some sense of
knowledge/history; however, I welcome any attorneys to help clarify my
points below.
THIS IS THE REALITY
1) The deferred action that started last week is just that. DEFERRED
ACTION. It is an offshoot of the
Morton Memo that came out last June
and is targeted specifically at the DREAMers. It gives those who grew
up here and completed their education here a chance to stay without fear
of deportation for TWO YEARS. The primary reason for the
administration to do this is that Congress has not acted on this bill.
The DREAM Act was a bill introduced by Sen. Orrin Hatch (yes,
that
Orrin Hatch) and supported by Sen. John McCain and was once popular among
both Democrats and Republicans; it is now out of favor with the Republicans after the last Congress was elected.
It DOES NOT give them a legal route to citizenship, it just gives them
some peace for two years while hopefully Congress can pass a
comprehensive immigration reform bill or the DREAM Act. It will not
"clog up" the waiting period for green card applications or contribute to the current backlog.
The authorization to work that will be provided to this group is not a H1-B visa. According to the FAQ by
the
Immigration Policy Center (I encourage people to read it, it is very
informative):
"Can a person who is granted deferred action work legally in the U.S.?
>Yes. Under existing regulations, individuals with deferred action
may receive an Employment Authorization Document (EAD). Individuals who
wish to request an extension of deferred action after two years will
also have to apply for a renewal of their EAD."
A job authorization is not the same as an H1-B visa. An OPT visa is a job
authorization document, which lasts one year for foreigners who
graduated from a U.S. college and it gets processed within 45 days (when I
did it 6 years ago), so please do not confuse EAD with H1-B. H1-B
is an EAD but an EAD is not a H1-B.
The deferred action is not an amnesty - it gives the DREAMers 2 more
years to stay here and work here while Congress gets their act
together.
What happens at the end of the two years? Who knows? The next
administration might not want to renew the deferred action policy or Congress might finally get
their act together and pass a bill. According to the FAQ again by IPC:
"How long does deferred action last?"
>Under the childhood arrivals initiative, deferred action will be
granted for a two-year period, after which recipients may request a
renewal. According to DHS, individuals will be eligible for future
renewals of deferred action so long as they were under age 31 on June
15, 2012.
In contrast: the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has confirmed numerous times
that LGBT couples (and the Morton Memo applies) are considered families
through various requests from the media but as of this date, they have
not actually put it in writing, so we are still beholden on the
individual prosecutorial discretions of individual cases. The House
Democrats (about 85 of them including Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi) also
sent a letter to the DHS urging for a clearer
language. Rather than putting this in writing, DHS instead confirmed it
to journalist Chris Geidner of Buzzfeed that LGBT couples
are indeed considered families and will be entitled to deferred action when it
comes to deportations.
In our last petition on
Change.org, we asked President Obama to do the same for same-sex binational couples:
http://www.change.org/
petitions/president-of-the-
united-states-issue-a-
memorandum-to-grant-immigratio
n-rights-to-lgbt-americans
I actually delivered about 1,200 signatures on this petition to the
White House's point person on Immigration, Felicia Escobar last month in
Washington DC. The petition as of today has about 1,400 signatures.
Had the deferred action been applied to us and not the DREAMers, would we feel differently?
The argument from conservatives and anti-immigration groups is to frame/depict this and everything immigration-related
as "amnesty" or "stealing jobs" or "freeloaders" and we must be careful
not to repeat that divisive rhetoric. Because when it comes to us, they
like to frame our issue as "fraud", "marriage of convenience", "stealing jobs", "government sanctioning of a immoral lifestyle" etc. etc. etc....
One thing of note: The last time something akin to an amnesty was
done was in the 1980s by a Republican president and that was probably
the last time we have had any amnesty action.
2) BACKLOGS
There are many reasons why there are backlogs. Yes, it is about resources but at the same time it is also about quotas.
Every country has a quota. Congress sets/determines every year how many
people from each country can immigrate here (that quota system has not
been changed for a long time). Congress also sets the quota based on
the visa that you are applying for, whether it is under Family Visa,
Work Visa, Green Card based on work etc. So, even if you are
approved for a green card based on work or familial relationship, you
will still have to wait for your "number" to be called. There have been
cases where a green card application is approved but the waiting time
for the green card can be at least a decade. There have been numerous
bills and numerous organizations that have urged Congress to
review the country quota over the years (as it is dated and the
rationale for the quota needs to be reviewed) but to no avail. There is
also the problem that some countries like Singapore (where I am from)
do not usually meet the quota, i.e., less people want
to move here than what was allocated for but instead of using those unused quota "openings" for other countries that need them, they simply expire.
And don't get me going about the quotas for H1-B visas...we all know that the quotas are not enough!
Rep. Mike Honda has introduced a bill for the last three sessions of
Congress called the "Reuniting Families Act" (RFA). The bill, if passed,
will do a couple of things. 1) Pass UAFA (the language of UAFA is
included in the bill; (2) reduce the backlogs - the bill will
transfer the "unused" visas and transfer them to other
categories/countries that have met their quotas; and (3) allow
for Filipino veterans who fought in WWII (yes WWII !!!) to finally get
their green card and citizenship. This is just a small sampling of what the bill will do; there are many more actions.
As a point of note, during the first and only hearing in the Senate
Judiciary Committee on Immigration about UAFA held by Sen. Patrick Leahy
in June 2010, there was a conservative immigration group that
testified against the passage of UAFA. One of the primary reasons that
they gave was that "to allow LGBT couples to immigrate will further
clog the badly backlogged immigration process...we need to prevent more
people coming in as opposed to letting more people come in." (I am
paraphrasing of course and if you want to find footage of that hearing, I
am sure you can Google it or find it on the Congressional website.)
3) WHY IS OUT4IMMIGRATION SUPPORTING THIS ISSUE?
The answer is pretty simple - Why not?
There are more than 40,000 same-sex binational couples affected by this issue in this
country.
40,000 couples. I am not even counting those that are in exile
or living apart.
Are our situations all the same? Hell no! Some of us have partners who
are undocumented, some of us have partners who are here on a student
visa, some of us have partners who are here on a work visa, some of us
have partners who visit us once every year for 3 weeks and some of us
have partners who are unable to even get a passport to leave the
country they reside in to come here. Our situations are all
different and there are many solutions to our problems. Until the
discriminatory DOMA is repealed or UAFA is finally passed,
any solution that will let my brothers and sisters in these
situations find some path to remaining in the U.S. legally will be
supported by O4I.
Further, as a matter of political strategy we must be mindful that we
CANNOT endeavor to fight this alone. By definition, we are a relatively
small group of people. We NEED the help and support of anyone and
everyone. When we support inclusiveness and fairness in reforms and
relief measures, we are more likely to be included. If we do NOT
support inclusiveness and fairness for others, we CANNOT expect any
support - in fact it would likely be denied.
Please do understand that at the end of the day, we are an all-volunteer
grassroots organization. We are not the behemoth that is HRC or any
other big LGBT organization that people seem to think we are. The work
that you see done by O4I is the work of a few dedicated volunteers who want to
see the laws changed. We will take any solution we can get to bring us
closer to that change. We support UAFA, RFA, RMA (Respect for
Marriage Act), DREAM Act, Inclusive CIR (Comprehensive Immigration
Reform) - anything that would create momentum and move us forward and
give us a solution to allow us to be with the one we love.
4) WHY IS DEFERRED ACTION AN LGBT ISSUE?
Because it is a civil rights, human rights issue. Are LGBT rights a
civil rights and human rights issue? You bet they are! If you have
been following the news, you would know that NOM, the National Organization for Marriage, has
a strategy that they put forth a couple of years ago to divide and
conquer - to pit ethnic groups against LGBT groups and to have them come
out and say that marriage equality is not a civil rights issue because
well, they cannot change their skin color but we can change our
sexuality. And like it or not, the same strategy is still being used to
separate us as opposed to uniting us. If we don't support issues that
are in our favor because it is not specifically an LGBT issue, why
should our allies and straight people support LGBT issues because it is
not about them?
Personally for me, being documented or undocumented is a very thin line.
If you are on a H1-B visa and got pink slipped tomorrow, you have 10
days to pack up and leave the country or 60 days to find a job and get
another H1-B visa. (Something like this happened to me just after
9/11.) If you have a spouse here and perhaps a kid... maybe you are
fortunate to buy a house when the economy is good...what's your
choice? Do you just pack up and leave or do you try to find ways to
stay? Becoming undocumented means you cannot leave the U.S. at all if
your parents fall ill or, God forbid, pass away. Becoming undocumented
means you have to live your life in the shadows just so you can stay
here to be with your husband, wife or partner or kids. Becoming
undocumented means you have to stay silent and not make noise or someone
might report you. It is not a life anyone would choose but the broken
system (and in our case, our discriminatory laws) often force this choice.
The DREAMers however did not have a choice. Most of them were brought
here by their parents or families when they were young. Most of
them do not have family ties back home.I have met families where two
siblings are Americans and one is undocumented. I met
the Pulitzer Prize winner, Jose Antonio Vargas, who is gay and
undocumented and many other DREAMers who are gay and undocumented, too. Their stories mirror our own tragic tales.
Deferred action might not be a solution for some of you, but it is a
solution for some of us in this community in this struggle. This might
mean that for the next two years, someone can work legally without
fear and work tirelessly to change the laws for all of us. For that I
celebrate the relief it provides for the short time that it does.
That said, this election is also pretty important because we need to
carefully examine who are the people who are supporting our issue and
who are the people who want us gone. At Out4Immigration, we are not
allowed to endorse any candidates so it is important for all of you to
go find information about the candidates in your district and where they
stand on the issues of the repealing DOMA (Respect for Marriage Act, or
RMA), the passage of UAFA, RFA, Inclusive CIR, ENDA and marriage
equality.
I hope I have addressed some issues that have been percolating among some of you over the past couple of days. I just want to leave you with a quote
that I saw recently that I love from Mr. Nelson Mandela:
"For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains,but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others." - Nelson Mandela.
Sen.
Patrick Leahy (D-VT) was forced to withhold critical amendments that
would have added protections for same-sex binational couples due to lack
of support from his own party. 
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