Notes on Queering Immigration.

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) and immigrant rights are two hotly contested areas of policy advocacy and community organizing in the United States today. Millions of immigrants marched on streets of large and small cities of the US in spring of 2006 in their opposition to draconian immigration bills, and demanding legalization for all immigrants. While Gay marriage, Employment Non-Discrimination, equal treatment in the US military, and Hate Crime legislation has been the clarion call of the LGBTQ movement in the recent years.  LGBTQ immigrants find themselves uniquely positioned on the boundaries of both these movements. Voices of LGBTQ immigrants have often been on the margins of these movements.

There is little discussion of how immigration is also an issue for LGBTQ people, and even less analysis of the structural similarities between queer and immigrant struggles. LGBTQ immigrants are marginalized or invisible at the intersection of two identities. As a whole, more complex family structures -- such as those of binational same-sex couples and extended families -- are completely absent from the larger struggle for immigration reform. The immigrant advocacy movement places undue emphasis on heteronormative relationships and conceptions of normality in an effort to gain basic citizenship rights. The mainstream LGBTQ rights movement tends to focus on those immigrants who are partners of US citizens. This leaves out the predicament of, for instance, single people and/or those who do not define themselves within conventional relationships like marriage or conjugality. Both movements are depriving themselves of the power and strategic insights that LGBTQ immigrants can provide.

LGBTQ immigrants have begun to organize in many of the large metropolitan areas across the country. Several formations such as Love Sees No Borders, the Immigration Project at National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) in San-Francisco, Chicago Area Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Immigrants Alliance (CLIA), Immigrant Rights working group at the Audre Lorde Project in Brooklyn, New York and the Queer Immigrant Rights Project in New York have been organizing LGBTQ immigrants. Partnership recognition in immigration law, removal of the HIV ban on immigration and travel to the US, repealing of the REAL ID Act, fair treatment of HIV positive and transgender detainees have emerged as hotly contested issue areas in these formations. In February 2007 a coalition of about fifty LGBTQ and immigrant rights organizations came out with the first national “Queer and Transgender Vision Statement on Immigration Reform”. LGBTQ immigrants organized “queer contingents” at many of the immigration rallies.

The history of LGBTQ immigrants is difficult to trace. Some records exist on arrests of Greek and South-Asian migrant laborers on sodomy charges in the Pacific Northwest in the early part of the twentieth century. Gender and sexuality along with race, class and country of origin has played important role throughout the history of immigration policy making in the US.  The exclusion of LGBT immigrants from the US can be traced to as early as 1917 when people labeled as “constitutional psychopathic inferiors” were barred from entry. In 1952 we see the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) also known as McCarran-Walter Act, which codified the ban on “psychopathic personalities”. However it is not until 1965 we see the emergence of the term “sexual deviates” as a category for denying entry and right to stay in the US. This ban was finally lifted in 1990. In 1992 a ban was placed on those living with HIV and AIDS. The HIV ban on travel and immigration has just been recently removed from the INA, as a part of the “President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Research” (PEPFAR). HIV/AIDS continue to remain on the list of diseases of public health significance of the Health and Human Services (HHS). Intense lobbying efforts are being mounted by HIV/AIDS, Immigrant Rights and LGBT organizations to strike it off the HHS list.

Another major “opening of doors” for LGBT immigrants happened when Attorney General Janet Reno issued order 1895-94 in 1994 following the BIA decision in the case of Toboso-Alfonso calling the then Immigration and Naturalization Services, to grant asylum to those who identify as homosexual and are escaping persecution from their governments.   Recent case studies of successful asylum cases have been documented by the Asylum Project, of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.While recent academic and policy researchers have documented the asylum process, the limitations of solely reading LGBTQ immigrants as helpless victims seeking protection from the US nation-state, not much has been written about the community organizing strategies and policy advocacy startegies being deployed by LGBTQ immigrants themselves.

Organizing at the intersections of gender, sexuality and immigrant rights holds much potential in disrupting the hetronormativity inherrent in immigrant rights struggles, and dislocating the embedded neoliberal notions of individualism and freedom inherrent in US based LGTQ rights movements.