The Immigration Woes of Mixed Couples
// March 25th, 2008 // Immigration
I just read an article in the Canadian Express about the immigration woes of mixed couples, not necessarily inter-racial, but where one is an American citizen and the other is an ‘illegal’ immigrant. Contrary to popular opinion, marrying an American citizen is not the ‘fast and cheap’ way of obtaining American citizenship, especially if you are an ‘illegal’ immigrant without a 245-i (Fash can help document her experiences with U.S. Immigration regarding this). In order to process citizenship, the ‘illegal’ part of the family is sent home, and has to wait several long years for the approval of a waiver to come back to the United States. Naturally, most couples would rather stay together than go through this process of family separation that may well result in not reconciling under the law. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that we have over 2 million mixed families such as these in the United States.
Kecia Sales and Juan Marquez are one such couple that decided to undergo the long and tenous process of Marquez finally residing in the United States legally. Under the law, ‘family values’ like love and commitment are not enough to grant the couple the right to live together legally. Since Marquez entered the United States illegally, the law bars him from re-entering for another 10 years, and the government must approve a waiver from his wife proving extenuating hardship to her due to his absence. Sales’ waiver request was denied two weeks ago and she has been given 30 days to collect evidence for an appeal to prove hardship.
“It’s stressful, very stressful, because I don’t know if he’s coming back. It’s just that I’m sure we’re doing the right thing. This is my home, and I want it to be here with my husband.”
Sales finishes up by saying that if she can’t get the waiver approved, she would move to Mexico to be with her husband.
“That’s what I’ll have to do. That’s my husband. I have to go where he goes,” she said. “I love him, I can’t forget about him.”
Besides the fact that the entire ordeal is completely unneccessary and out-of-this-world preposterous, it invokes feelings of déjà vu. I hit the history books to confirm my suspicions and sure enough, only a hundred years ago, American women who married foreign nationals were stripped of their American citizenship! Immigration laws represented the intersectionality of racial and gender bigotry –Even in the 1922 Cable Act, American citizen women who wedded ‘aliens ineligible for citizenship’ (Asians), were also stripped of their citizenship! Alright, the case of mixed families today is not a de jure stripping of citizenship, but if Kecia Sales and countless others cannot get waivers approved for their husbands and/or wives, they would most likely have to uproot their homes and lives out of the United States. Surely, the immigration woes of mixed couples today sounds strikingly like the discriminatory immigration laws faced by inter-racial and bi-national couples just a hundred years ago. (And can I once again sneak in the fact that the immigration problems of bi-national homosexual couples continues to this day?)
Does that not sound utterly regressive and backward? Is it really this necessary to wreck homes and separate families through our unforgiving immigration laws? Why is it that the people who speak about family values and the right to life are not up in arms about this issue? Would the so-called ‘pro-family’ advocates and the Defense of Marriage Act advocates stand up and pass legislation to ease this process and prevent family separation? Or are our legislators just ‘pro-family’ when they need to spew bigotry towards couples that do not fit the norm?
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Hey Taskgirl, good to see you here. This is MAGraduate from DAP. All the best with your ordeal.
While marriage to a US citizen may be the fastest way to become a U.S. resident that doesn’t make it easy! Every year families are split up while waiting apart for their application to be approved. Many families are scammed by lawyers and notarios who don’t understand the process. Most people don’t get this process. Sometimes people who are inelgible for the waiver are sent to their appointments not knowing. For example, if someone entered the country illegally twice they are given a lifetime ban with no option for a waiver for TEN years – even if they were a minor when this occured. There are ALL kinds of complications in this process and for those not going through Mexico, the other countries are very difficult to get an approval through. Why should families have to be seperated? It should be much easier. And THIS is the best way we have? That is very sad not only for us but for all immigrants attempting other ways or simply waiting for reform..
Amy – Thank you so much for sharing your story and your blog. My best wishes are with both of you as you embark on this ordeal together.
Jim, you do realize that marriage to a US citizen is by far the easiest and fastest way to become a U.S. resident? By most people’s standard’s it’s an ordeal so imagine what people who aren’t married to U.S. citizens must go through to become U.S. residents.
Jim – We are talking about different issues here – bi-national legal couples vs. 2 that are already in the U.S.-one legal and the other illegal. Unless your friend’s wife was here illegally from Poland and sent back home for several years, you are talking about an entirely different matter. For the waiver to return to the U.S., you don’t just need to submit intimate letters – you have to prove actual hardship to the U.S. citizen, which is often denied by the CIS.
Don’t flaunt the “we are a nation of laws” – We are also a nation that regularly breaks more laws that we can keep track of. The law is not a constant by itself that should be worshiped. A lot of despicable things like slavery, Jim Crow, segregation and the Cable Act that I mentioned were legal – It doesn’t make it right, just or fair. The law must be changed.
I am one of those American wives married to an illegal immigrant. My husband is very likely ineligible for a waiver even though he was brought unwillingly when he was a child, due to some complications in his story.
Despite this, he was raised to have high hopes, and this made staying in the US impossible, with no driver’s license, no decent job, and no chance to finish his pre-med program at college.
That’s why I abandoned everything I worked hard for MY whole life – my well-paying career, my car, health insurance, family, friends, home, security. All of this I was forced to leave behind so I could move to Mexico with my husband where we don’t have to live in fear of ICE and watch him get treated like less than a human. Most couples and families in our situation don’t even have the “privilege” to leave like we did.
In exchange, I now work for $3.50 an hour and both of us struggle to make a living in Mexico as English teachers. BOTH our lives are on hold indefinitely. Right now we have the yearlong wait just to find out if we’re eligible to find a waiver. If we’re not eligible, it’s going to be a lifetime of finding a place where both of us can finally pursue our dream.
I have a friend who married a woman from Poland. Not only did they have to wait, but he had to submit some rather intimate letters they had exchanged in order to prove that there was a relationship and that they were not engaging in a “marriage of convenience”. There are rules. The couple about whom I spoke waited until ICE approved the reason for her immigration and they finally married. We are a nation of laws
Did you read the article? Obviously not. It talks about the lengthy process of legalization in a mixed bi-national family and how it causes separation and can result in an American citizen leaving their home to settle somewhere else. And it is put into a historical context and compared to an era of immigration law ripe with the intersectionality of racism and sexism. “Becoming legal” is what triggers this process. Now I am sure that ad-homs are not the solution to this problem. Try again.
They’re called ILLEGAL for a reason. Become legal jackasses