Solidarity

I am always on the look-out for other exiles, potential exiles, and folks who share some or all of the international relationship, travel, and re-location experience. Sometimes that means wild Google searches until I find something interesting. Unfortunately, classic exiles hide ourselves well – what with waivers pending, lawyers lawyering, and all of us waiting to quietly reclaim normalcy once there's been a change of policy...

I couldn't tell you how many of us are out there, but through word of mouth I have been slowly meeting more and more of us every month, and with 2.2 million immigrants deported from 1997 to 2007 (more than 100,000 of whom have citizen children) the Americans who have at least faced this choice must be numerous! The ever-increasing deportation numbers can only mean that our ranks are growing.

But where are we?! I don’t mean that in the geographic sense as the answer is clearly “not in America.” I mean, why are we so quiet? I wish we all had blogs and all wrote letters and all made a general stink -- putting real faces on a barbaric and largely unknown national policy of choosing between love and country. At least then people would know about the bar and they would be the ones making the choice of where to stand.

But whether or not to speak out is an individual decision that I must respect, especially since a lot of exiles are hoping and praying that their good behavior is their spouses’ ticket to the US of A.

And I do always wonder; what would happen if I got sick or hurt or someone in my family got sick or hurt, and I had to leave and apply for that damn waiver?! Would someone find this blog? I mean, I hope that our public servants with USCIS have better things to do than retaliatory blog Googling… you know, better things like expeditiously moving applications through the system with the goal of reuniting families as quickly as possible…

But I think that those same worries keep a lot of exiles very, very quiet.

So, in search of community, I have stumbled upon another set of exiles about whom I was always very aware, but whose plight I have yet to highlight: bi-national GBLTQ folk.

Let's start with this wild piece of trivia: you cannot sponsor your same-sex partner in the United States, but GLBTQ Brazilians face few impediments to bringing their same-sex partners to a land where gay men are so closeted that dating one requires you to put up with his long-term girlfriend and where lesbians only exist to sell beer and cologne to male audiences. Tells you a little something about where the prejudice really lies when the rubber meets the road…

So, Americans with foreign-born same-sex partners often face the same choice as straight exiles… without the waiver option. No hardship, apparently, is strong enough to allow a gay American to live in the US with their partner. And then there’s the fact that, for straight Americans, the bar ends at some point; 10 years from now, Leo and I will be allowed to live in the US (if we still want to... yeesh!).

Maybe because they’ve got nothing left to fear from the American immigration system, there are a bunch of GLBTQ Americans in bi-national relationships who blog actively about exile. And what wonderful, tear-jerking, feisty, loving reading! The best part about those blogs is that they talk about living a fulfilling life with the person they love in a place that honors their dedication to one another without waivers or pardons or “extreme hardship” – just two people who will go anywhere and do anything to remain side-by-side.

Right now, that place isn’t the United States. I suppose we're all waiting on policy to change – either to recognize your commitment to one another or your right to live out that commitment in your own country – I just wanted to express a little solidarity. There are other American exiles out there, and we’re all better off supporting and advocating for one another.