The ‘I Came Here Legally and Paid My Taxes Act for DOMA Overstayers’

I had to take a serious Facebook break for a couple of months, almost one year after coming out as “queer and undocumented” and incessantly posting about it.

So one day I more or less spontaneously took a two months break from Facebook, which kind of felt like traveling back in time as far as how slow and relaxed life started to feel again. I finally walked around in parks and on beaches without checking my phone every couple of hours. Two months without logging in once, just because I really needed it.

After moving super slow on Facebook for years I took the opportunity last year (July 9 2015) to use that particular medium to publicly announce my undocumented status.

(I had studied film in Los Angeles, moving here legally from the Netherlands on a 5 year student visa in 1992, only to be excluded from realistically the only existing pathway to US citizenship, which is marriage to a US citizen, through the passing of DOMA in 1996 instead, just 1 year before my visa was about to expire.)

This will be the last article, or rant, by me on the subject matter of being queer and undocumented, in written format, and after this I will be filming my thoughts on these matters on video and post the YouTube videos on Facebook.

For the moment being I am also in production of my feature documentary on US LGBT immigration discrimination “The Queer Case for Individual Rights, (From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented.”)

The decision to come out publicly as queer and undocumented is a very serious one, which can come with serious consequences.

I’ve been out as lesbian since 1994, although was coerced into opposite sex marriage by an American fellow film student in 1992, which messed up my student status, but I was never in deportation proceedings. And since I have a Social Security number and no “discernible traces” of being foreign really I could have stayed quiet on the issue altogether, although I was getting increasingly racially profiled. I am bi-racial Dutch-Indonesian, which the Californian authorities like to interpret as Mexican/ Latin, and “so probably illegal.”

My ex-husband’s incessant stalking of me at school throughout 1993 had led me to eventually drop out altogether and so violate the terms of my student visa. He even followed me back to the Netherlands in ‘92.

I had originally planned to keep studying film in Los Angeles as long as possible, hoping to get an MFA in film at UCLA, as it afforded me a chance to legally work on campus and potentially get a work visa.

And at the time of my divorce in 1994 stalking wasn’t yet a part of a newly introduced anti-domestic violence bill to combat immigrant exploitation within bi-national marriages between foreigners and American citizens, the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, and I also hadn’t reported any of his abuse neither.

(I am currently still married to an American guy, who took over where the first guy left off and further complicated my situation and completely took advantage of it, and me, and so am eligible for the Violence Against Women Act after all, which I am currently filing with my immigration lawyer.)

I decided to come out of “the shadows” because it was getting to be unbearable to have to lie about any aspect of myself anymore and because being undocumented was impoverishing me severely, and in every way, not just financially.

I have never personally felt any shame or guilt over my decision to move to Los Angeles legally on a student visa to study film and become a filmmaker in Hollywood. Of course after all, I did everything legally. And besides, the dream of making a living as an artist only seems acceptable after one has “made it” anyway, for a struggling artist is usually written off by non-creative society as either lazy or crazy or a combination of both.

And I have also never felt any guilt or shame around being lesbian and gender nonconforming neither, and so naturally I don’t feel any guilt or shame over having “overstayed” my student visa in 1997. I was after all specifically excluded from the only realistic pathway to US immigration, marriage, to a US citizen, through federal LGBT discrimination in the form of the Defense Of Marriage Act in 1996.

By the way, every foreigner coming to the US legally on a student visa or a work visa is misled by the US government into believing this could lead to US citizenship sponsorship, which in reality is not a possibility as there is absolutely no profit in it for a US employer to sponsor a foreigner financially for US citizenship, and the foreigner is not allowed to pay the US employer for the sponsorship themselves, so it would have to be paid for by the employer. Simply not worth it for the employer at all.

But the real issue that has been bothering me, and which really prompted me to drop out of Facebook for a bit, is that there has not been any legislation drafted around the people who entered the US legally and then became out-of-status.

I had been planning to make my status public for some time before I actually did in 2015, and had been very inspired to do so by Pulitzer price winning ex-Washington Post journalist turned filmmaker Jose Antonio Vargas’ own coming out in New Time Magazine in 2011.

Before that I had only been trying to get people in the film industry interested my screenplay about my situation, but it was simply too early in the 2000s to get taken serious on the inter-sectioning identities of being LGBT and out-of-status, and I also did not have enough knowledge myself about this subject matter to truly properly present my case to anyone.

In fact, the structure of my screenplay became so complicated because of the complexity of the subject matter of inter-sectioning identities that I decided to switch over to documentary format in 2013, a decision I definitely don’t regret, although the feature narrative version is just sitting on my shelf collecting dust in the meantime.

The fact that no separate legislation exists for “overstays” is certainly not the fault of the DREAM-Acters, nor the DACA and DAPA eligible, (with still no promise of US citizenship at the end of president Obama’s executive action and I wonder what the solution to that might be as well,) for they have done more than their fair share of being courageous and inspiring to others.

Out of the estimated 11 million undocumented 5 million qualify for DACA and DAPA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Parents,) leaving another 7 million behind in various stages of expired papers, for most of the very people who do not qualify for the DREAM Act or DACA/DAPA, actually entered the US legally on valid paperwork.

So what this comes down to is that the people who entered “illegally” are getting deferred action, (although only a small step towards having legal paperwork in the US, and not at all of a permanent nature,) while the people who entered legally, who stood in line for an initial visa of sorts, whether it be a student visa or work visa, (or even tourist visa or tourist visa waiver*,) and even those who stood in the significantly shorter line to the alter, and for whatever reason got divorced, and who also paid income taxes all along, are actually the very ones who are left completely undocumented now.

(Expired paperwork is only slightly better than no paperwork, with the one big pro being that you are in the system but the one big con also being that you are in the system.)

*At least 26 European countries, (as well as the US,) have been able to travel for decades without tourist visas under the Schengen contract, thus called a visa waiver, including the Netherlands, but I got a 5 year student visa anyway because it was my dream to become a filmmaker in Hollywood, not to be a tourist.

I had already done a lot of traveling in my youth, including to the US, and was by 1992 absolutely dead serious about going to college and being a filmmaker, and I took every legal step possible to make that happen, costing me tons of money in the process.

And yes, the Schengen contract is a perfect example of real and existent white/European privilege.

So I am not at all trying to drive a monkey wrench into an already extremely controversial issue in this country, by dividing us through passing judgment on certain undocumented people but not on others. I personally understand perfectly well that certain countries, and so the citizens of those countries, had less than equal immigration opportunities available to them from the start, and so ultimately needed a “leg up” more desperately than the “overstayers,” and they demanded it for themselves through tireless activism, and didn’t get it through just some presidential favor.

And I personally also do not blame people for having come here entirely “illegally,” as those people are technically refugees, and it is absolutely not a crime to be a refugee.

The US gives out an extremely limited amount of asylum-based visas, while at the same time stoking the fires in other countries continuously through the backing of dictatorships, so if somebody nearly escapes their increasingly violent country with their life and crosses over into another country without properly knocking first, I don’t see an issue with that. I personally commend the will to survive and to live, without hurting others, in any individual regardless of age, race, nation, gender, orientation or belief system or whatever else.

And no, refugees are not hurting anyone by moving into the neighborhood and applying for a job to pay their rent. I could by the same token tell heterosexual couples to stop producing children at such a fast rate that they will end up “stealing all the jobs” from previously existing LGBT people who have been for years discriminated in the workforce.

So this is absolutely not written to criticize those amongst the 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country, who entered the US illegally. I took all my cues and inspiration from these very people. But despite the generous solidarity offered by the “truly undocumented” I have found myself isolated still, simply because of our different backgrounds and so our different motivations for coming to the US.

Ironically enough the first thing that is lost on me is the language, as well as some cultural differences. While every foreigner is rudely reminded to speak English by a country that declared independence from England to begin with, I as a Dutch citizen was mandatorily taught Dutch, English, French and German in high school in the Netherlands, (for practical purposes, read business purposes,) but not Spanish, the only real practical second language here and the seemingly dominating language amongst the undocumented. And of course Latin people speak English perfectly fine. And of course also, English spoken with any accent at all is still English.

But I feel a larger disconnect, which seems to be at least partially cultural, to do with the importance of the roles of family and also religion, as I don’t relate to either.

Whereas much of the focus around the undocumented immigration debate is around the inhumanely forced separations of families, I, having grown up in Western Europe and also being a member of the LGBT community, attach less significance to the importance of family.

I’m ultimately of course only speaking for myself but I do think that growing up in families, who disapprove of homosexuality anyway, sort of cuts your ties to them specifically, while maybe not to the idea of family itself. But this does lessen my personal importance on being reunited with my family back in the Netherlands, and I would rather focus on having a family of my own and so in the US.

And not to say people in Western Europe don’t love their families of course but the ties really do seem closer in Latin and Asian communities.

And as someone who grew up in Western Europe, and the Netherlands specifically, I do not seem to connect to religion at all, and am happily atheist myself. Much of Latin culture, as well as US culture unfortunately, involves an importance of religion, and I just simply reason through what I consider logic and do not even consider myself spiritual. What I’m particularly irked by in the US is that no separation between church and state seems to exist, while the actual US constitution very much demanded one.

Religion didn’t do much for the LGBT community neither, so that doesn’t really help but my argument for atheism is based in logic, not resentment towards those who use religion to bash LGBT communities.

And lastly, what also seems different is our motivations for coming here, or rather the degree of seriousness towards the need for a better life seems different.

My need to be a filmmaker in Hollywood could seemingly be written off as a less urgent need than the need to escape a violent dictatorship or war or even domestic violence in the current immigration debate.

But my need to be a filmmaker came from the very real need to be recognized, as visible and valid and deserving of equal rights. And I was very much abused by my government and environment alike by having been denied LGBT rights and social visibility in the Netherlands back in the 80s as well.

But the big point to my little rant here is, where are all the overstayers?! We are seriously lagging here. Those who are out, those who are desperate to come out, those who are hiding still, we need to communicate with each other and come up with a separate strategy to gain momentum in the immigration debate again.

We need to come up with a strategy that is more closely tailored to our specific needs but that does not demonize those amongst the undocumented who came here “illegally.” We need to highlight both our differences and our commonalities to compliment the whole big picture of who the 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country are.

I personally would really like to hear more from the “overstayers” amongst the 11 million, (and about half of us are,) and specifically those who are LGBT and were specifically impacted by DOMA, or other targeted LGBT immigration discrimination legislation that interfered with their chance to become a US citizen.