The Immigration Marriage Fraud Act of 1986 Must Go Down

GABRIELLA BREGMAN FRIDAY, JANUARY 22, 2016

My name is Gabriella Bregman, I’m a Los Angeles-based writer-filmmaker-producer from the Netherlands, currently producing a feature documentary about LGBT immigration injustice, (through specific exclusion policies like DOMA, which in terms of immigration law “replaced” the HIV travel ban that had replaced the LGBT travel ban, previously called “sexual deviancy” laws, and which in turn has affected the Immigration Marriage Fraud Act and the Violence Against Women Act.)

I am one of approximately 267.000 LGBT-undocumented immigrants, amongst a total 11 million undocumented immigrants. I am also a Legal Entry Immigrant, (about half of the 11 million are as well.)

‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights: From International Film Student to Queer and Undocumented’ is an expose of the US’s “broken” immigration system, its’ unconstitutional exclusion policies and specific targeting of LGBT communities, (in a long history of policymaking designed to exploit the most vulnerable of minority groups, specifically women and people of color,) and my own situation as “queer and undocumented,” former film student within that.

In 1992, at age 19, I moved from the Netherlands to the US on a 5-year student visa to study film in Los Angeles, only to get caught between an immigration work visa quota-system in which there is no room for a filmmaker and a government-sanctioned LGBT-discriminatory bill in the Defense Of Marriage Act which set me up for opposite-sex spousal abuse instead.

In 1992, at 19, I moved to the US legally on a 5-year student visa to study film in Los Angeles through enrollment in the film program at Los Angeles City College and with intent to transfer to a 4-year university on a visa extension, (aiming for UCLA,) but within my first school semester I was pressured into an immigration marriage by a fellow film student, canceling out my student visa status. After divorcing my husband I couldn’t legalize myself due to the Defense Of Marriage Act and the fact that I’m lesbian, which was the primary reason for the divorce in 1994.

I identify as a gender nonconforming lesbian. I consider my gender identity to be trans-masculine, and do not require any medical or social transitioning, and will keep my birth name and female pronouns, although do not mind male versions of either, (Gabriel, he,) and have been “mistaken” for a boy or man throughout my life due to my androgynous appearance.

My androgyny ultimately caused for a lot of social misunderstanding, shunning and hating from people and caused severe social gender dysphoria in me, but I fortunately do not suffer from body dysphoria, probably at least partially due to my sort of natural androgyny. I experience being gender nonconforming more as a disconnect from others and even my own body’s functioning but not as body anxiety, just social anxiety at being constantly scrutinized and misunderstood.

I was subjected to domestic violence throughout my 24 years here, (including 7 years of homelessness,) in two opposite-sex marriages I couldn’t defend myself against legally in the US because of this country’s stance against same-sex marriage, and its’ exclusion from immigration policy, prior to June 26 2015, (and in California in 2013,) when DOMA was struck down federally.

I have paid income taxes on my real Social Security number and on my business license in the US for 24 years now, working at the Laemmle family owned Los Angeles art house movie theater chain The Laemmle Theatres throughout the 1990s, and have interned and volunteered in unpaid positions for non-profit film organization Film Independent, including celebrity escorting for their Independent Spirit Awards and Los Angeles Film Festival, and at various film production companies such as IFC/ Next Wave Films, Samuel Goldwyn Films and Miramax Films, and produced a highly successful John Cassavetes Film Retrospective in 2001.

I have a film production company, a Hollywood office, own and operate all of my film and computer equipment and am currently in post-production of my feature documentary ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights,’ but have been labeled “illegal” by the government and rendered deportable without due process, (not in deportation proceedings however.)

Because I was 19 when I entered the US legally on a 5-year student visa to study film in Los Angeles, instead of 16 or younger, I do not qualify for the 2012 DREAM-Act nor for DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) under President Obama’s 2014 Executive Action.

I am not a marriage fraud under any Immigration Marriage Fraud Act definition but an LGBT member and filmmaker who happens to have been born in the Netherlands, ironically the very first country to legalize same-sex marriage in 2001 and home to many American and Dutch LGBT bi-national couples, known as “love-exiles,” waiting for DOMA to get struck down in 2015 so they could return to the US. Having to witness the gradual realization by my family that my decision to study film in Los Angeles would necessarily result in a permanent separation, has only added to the difficulty of my situation.

I am not fraudulent but lesbian and a victim of specific federal anti-LGBT legislation within the US immigration law, and if I would have immigrated to the US in post-DOMA 2015 I would have qualified for citizenship through same-sex marriage at least, just like my heterosexual counterparts, (and with marriage already problematically and wrongfully being the only realistic option in the almost non-existent pathway to US citizenship.)

I am not a fraud but a (DOMA) victim of my time and place in LGBT history, a by now 43 year old gender nonconforming lesbian whose sexuality and identity have been erased and persecuted secretly from the American public.

To be “in the shadows,” as undocumented, required on a very real level to remain “in the closet” as well, and as an “out” gender nonconforming lesbian since 1994, (and this being the main cause for my opposite sex divorce to a US citizen husband and the cancellation of my adjustment-of-status,) this was becoming an ever increasing moral dilemma.

I did not have to come forward with my undocumented status in July of 2015, and was not necessarily a high risk for getting detected as I passed fairly easily for American for 23 years, except for being bi-racial and so increasingly suspect under racial profiling tactics, specifically in the close to the Mexican border town of Chula Vista where my husband’s family lived and we got married in 2007 during the height of immigration reform attempts then.

I was born in the Netherlands, am Dutch on my father’s side and Indonesian-Dutch on my mother’s, (Indonesia having been a Dutch colony for 400 years, until WW II’s occupation of the Netherlands by Germany put an end to that and consequently forced my mother to move to the Netherlands.)

I have also been repeatedly gender/identity profiled by police, throughout primarily my homeless time here, in which the police would stop me on the sidewalk until they had determined what sex I might have between my legs, and in the process also repeatedly threatened to take my California identification away because not believing I was “female” as it stated.

But it was primarily the conflict my undocumented existence was creating for me in my forced marriage to my second husband, (which is still ongoing and which I experience as psychological rape, while his actual sexual assaults have mostly stopped,) turning me into a ghost of my former self, especially since I had enjoyed a former life in the Netherlands, 19 years of unrestricted freedom to live, work, educate myself and travel internationally, that made me want to increasingly openly stand up against the anti-LGBT legislation policies I had been suffering under in the US. In the face of injustice civil disobedience is ones moral duty. Even to be eligible for the Violence Against Women Act, the bill to protect immigrant spouses from US spousal abuse, one must be currently married to the abuser, or only very recently divorced.

The Immigration Marriage Fraud Act of 1986, with its’ 2-year “Conditional Status” requirement for the foreign spouse in their citizenship pathway, and of which US citizen spouse can take full advantage, physically and sexually and otherwise, is an extremely dangerous and anti-woman piece of legislation which needs to be struck down next.

LGBT discrimination is actual gender and sex discrimination and unconstitutional, and if a government cannot even properly define marriage they have no way of establishing marriage fraud neither, and there will be an inevitable post-DOMA backlash of retroactive punishment surfacing in coming years.

I currently qualify through the Violence Against Women Act and am working on legalization with an immigration lawyer but to have been undocumented for 24 years, “persecuted on paper,” has been unbearable in every way and is in fact retroactive punishment, also in the process destroying any chance at love with a woman before DOMA was struck down in June of 2015.

In July of 2015 I came out as “queer and undocumented” socially and online to add my voice to the ongoing immigration conversation in rational defense of fair and comprehensive immigration; I believe the right to mobility is a universal, human right and not an American privilege.

(My husband had intended to come forward with me to back my story up but inevitably changed his mind to protect the image of his religious family.)

According to the Constitution and its’ preamble all human beings, (“men” but not exclusively Americans,) are created equal, with unalienable rights, which are self-evident.

These include the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, (even private property, one’s person, mind and body, and the fruits of one’s labor being private property.)

The right to life precedes and determines all other rights.

But life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness include the right to move/to be mobile, and to pursue income, and even to pursue love, of the consensual kind.

These are human rights, based on humankind’s ability to use reason to survive; not an American privilege.

The Immigration Marriage Fraud Act of 1986, (under which definition “sham marriage,” arranged marriage,” “mixed orientation marriage” and “forced marriage” all could fall,) is anti-woman, besides anti-immigration, legislation, and with its’ 2-year “Conditional Status” the perfect set-up for sexual abuse and domestic violence, “legally sanctioned marital rape,” to take place.

The IMFA’s requirement of a marriage being “bona fide” for immigration purposes requires primarily a trail of intermingled assets, the very important joint lease since living together is a primary requirement, and bank accounts and bills, etc. In fact the financial assets of the spouses should most definitely be mingled but it should never appear as if the marriage itself is a financial deal.

At the required immigration interview which serves to remove the foreign spouse’s 2-year conditional status and make them eligible for US citizenship questions are asked of both parties separately to establish intimacy, obviously indicating love and sex do have something to do with marriage.

(The fact that a Defense Of Marriage Act even existed for 19 years to essentially deny legal loving, sexual relationships between LGBT people could exist has been highly problematic in defining marriage fraud.

Since marriage is not for the purposes of reproductive sex, despite what religious orders might want to have one believe, and reproductive sex in and of itself is nothing virtuous as it does not necessarily involve consent, the marriage fraud act has been completely incompatible with DOMA.)

Between sham marriage, arranged marriage, mixed orientation marriage and forced marriage lies a whole area of “Grey Marriage,” various stages of nonconsensual or severely compromised relations, (just like “Grey Rape,” and including specifically marital rape, not legally recognized in the US until 1993.)

And if coerced marriages do exist in the US, and they do, then they will include physical and sexual coercion, marital rape, despite being outlawed in ’93. Foreign spouses will have a hard time reporting abuse and rape to US authorities as this might compromise their legal status, US spouses are aware of this in the 2-year immigration sponsorship process.

Marriage itself as a necessity for immigration is misogynist and unconstitutional.

(And government-sanctioned LGBT discrimination through immigration exclusion, specifically the LGBT marriage ban DOMA, of 1996, is also unconstitutional, including as sex and gender discrimination.)

Necessitating marriage for immigration purposes allows for and even necessitates “Grey Marriage” as well, including sexual and physical immigrant spousal abuse.

The Immigration Marriage Fraud Act of 1986 is misogynist legislation and unconstitutional and must be struck down.