Undocumented While Legal

I felt compelled to write yet another little piece on my status as former legal international film student turned undocumented because of being lesbian during DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act.)

I assume most of American citizens by now are somewhat familiar with the fact that there are some 11 million immigrants residing in the US without legal status, (primarily meaning Legal Permanent Residency or US Citizenship, but also including temporary legal status like work permits and student visas, the latter are non-immigrant visas,) living their lives in legal limbo and a constant state of doubt and fear.

Many might also know that this number has been semi-successfully split up in two groups, those who are DACA and DAPA eligible, close to 5 million, and those who are not, the rest of us, the 6 to 7 million left behind. (I fall in the latter category due to immigrating legally at age 19, not 16 or under, so missed the deadline by 3 years. From age 16 to 19 I worked in the Netherlands where I’m from to save up money, after finishing high school, to legally move to the US to study film in Los Angeles.)

DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,) an expansion of the original 2012 DREAM Act, and DAPA (Deferred Action for Parent Arrivals,) an attempt to not separate parents and children, (I’ve been separated from my family for 24 years now myself,) had been granted by president Obama in November of 2014 and was then stalled/interrupted by the Boston marathon bombings and a government shutdown, and has now been placed on an indefinite hold through a split vote decision.

Despite much debate over whether or not president Obama had the right to pass Executive Action it has been granted several times in the past, (and the idea of executive action even tying in to the first successful case under this, John Lennon,) the last one being in 1986 by Ronald Reagan, “amnestying” 3.5 million undocumented immigrants, (or “illegal aliens” as they were called then,) and leaving several millions out, some of whom are probably amongst the oldest of the 11 million today, a lot of others amongst them probably deported and/or deceased by now.

The Reagan administration however also put a terrible law in place in 1986, which I, as part of the LGBTQ community, still suffer from today, the Immigration Marriage Fraud Act, an immigration interview process to determine the “realness” of a marriage (“bona fide marriage,”) and marriage having had the exclusive definition of the union between one man and one woman, prior to DOMA being struck down in June of 2015, and so having excluded all LGBTQ people of being capable of having genuine relationships previously.

The most famous case of exclusion that I know of has been the 1975 marriage of American citizen Richard Adams and then Australian citizen Anthony Sullivan, (who finally and deservedly got his green card in 2016, four year after the passing of his husband Richard.)

This rare case (the marriage officiated by Boulder, Colorado county clerk Clela Rorex) has been extensively documented in the excellent and heart wrenching Tom Miller 2015 documentary “Limited Partnership.” The couple’s original application for immigration sponsorship was denied by the US government based on the offensive notion that a “bona fide marital relationship” could not exist “between two faggots,” (verbatim quote by US immigration officials for which Anthony Sullivan post-DOMA finally got an apology, along with his green card.) Anthony Sullivan’s story is a rare “success” story, having negatively affected him in about all areas of his and his husband’s lives for over 40 years.

These type of stories are also not generally highlighted in the media, and the general narrative has US citizens believe some 11 million people, necessarily of Mexican descent, all rushed the Southern border somehow, with an emphasis on rushing, as in some massive Mexican “invasion,” (and as if the a good part of US wasn’t Mexican territory in the past to begin with.)

The reality is infinitely more complex, and the simple fact is that much of the actual problem has to do with not just a “broken” but rather evil immigration system, which clearly discriminates unconstitutionally against certain groups of people, like the LGBTQ community throughout DOMA (from 1996 through 2015,) and before that the HIV travel ban, (lifted in 1990.)

Many people are actually shocked to learn that LGBTQ people could not officially immigrate to the US prior to 1990, (the HIV travel ban has its’ origins in a “sexual deviancy” law of 1952, so officially excluding LGBTQ immigrants from 1952 until 1990, and then again through DOMA.)

(HIV/AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease, which can also be contracted through needle sharing, but is not an airborne virus like the common cold or flu is, and which is the legal definition of a contagious disease according to US immigration policy. And you’re really not supposed to be having sex or sharing needles at airports or any other point of entry anyway. The HIV travel ban was in reality put forth to slow down LGBTQ rights won post the Stonewall Riots, and was a convenient way to smear Fidel Castro after the Mariel boat lift of Cuban refugees, dubbed Castro’s “undesirables,” during the 1980s, suggesting AIDS came from Cuba.)

The earliest immigration exclusion policy was the anti-woman Page Act of 1875, almost immediately followed by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, both designed to curb Chinese immigration, starting with Chinese women, who were accused of coming to the US for prostitution purposes.

The latest immigration exclusion policy is Donald Trump’s ban on Muslim immigrants, (an excessive and discriminatory screening process for Muslims and those from Muslim countries,) a ban which in reality already went into effect.

My problem in particular here, and the very reason for writing this piece, is with the exclusion of 7 million people from DACA/DAPA.

Through research of my own (and I am certainly not a lawyer) I had confirmed what I already suspected, namely that many of the 7 million people did not initially enter the US “without inspection,” or falsified papers, in other words illegally, (which is in and of itself officially a civil infraction and not a criminal offense,) but entered the country perfectly legally and were lied to/misled by the US government when they applied for visas.

For one the agricultural work visa, (which comes in a limited amount per year, or is “capped,”) which I understand is a “loose promise” of a 3-year work permit but in reality is a 1-year work permit with the possibility of 2 1-year extensions, which are never really given.

Number two are all the types of work visas which bring with them the automatic possibility of employer sponsorship, (also “capped,”) which never happens since the employer is required to pay for and process the employee’s paperwork, (even if the employer would be willing to pay it themselves, which is illegal,) and which simply is not worth it for employers.

And lastly the international (non-immigrant and uncapped) 5-year student visas, which also come with a promise of legal pathway to US citizenship, starting with a special work permit in the form of a real Social Security number, (with a stamp on it noting INS work authorization is needed,) allowing the foreign student to work in paid positions on their school campus only, and in unpaid positions acquire internship in their field of study, and for school credit. (This is how I ended up with a real Social Security number.)

The student visa is allowed several extensions and counts towards eventual work sponsorship in the form of a work permit, as long as one is in good standing with the school system, enrolled as an out-of-state tuition and full-time student necessarily.

This was the pathway to US citizenship laid out to me by the American Embassy in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, when I applied for my student visa in 1992 to major in film in Los Angeles.

The only existing legal pathway to US citizenship by the way is realistically marriage, and so previously only reserved for heterosexual immigrants.

(Please read some of my other articles regarding the unconstitutional notion of having to be married in order to acquire the right to pursue income to begin with.)

So the media now has created the myth that out of 11 million undocumented immigrants about 5 million are “semi-good,” innocent children who necessarily became students, and their parents, who mostly fled violence and poverty, (conveniently leaving out the fact that the violence and poverty were largely created by US foreign policies in Latin America, and particularly NAFTA in Mexico.)

But the media does not attempt to highlight what the situation regarding the other 7 million is at all, only suggesting these must be the bad apples in the bunch, and unfortunately those amongst the 11 million who are eligible for DACA and DAPA also do virtually nothing to acknowledge the circumstances around the 7 million left behind, (amongst them the entrepreneurs, the Harvard grad students, the people from Western countries, the people who came here with money, the non-refugees, etc., and also including the agricultural workers, and DOMA victims,) and I understand very well why.

If DACA and DAPA eligible people acknowledged the true circumstances around the 7 million, namely the fact that a lot of us came here legally, it puts them in a negative spotlight of having come here illegally. In a worst case scenario the American people could instead sympathize with those who came here legally, and then fell “out-of-status,” became undocumented while here legally, over those who came here illegally to begin with.

Yes, I am making myself very unpopular amongst the DACA/DAPA eligible crowd by stating these true facts but as a gender nonconforming lesbian popularity has never been on my side anyway.

I am not here to judge the “illegal entries” versus the “legal entries,” as I understand a person has every right to leave unbearable circumstances behind in search of a better life, (it is in fact the primary constitutional principle, “the right to life,”) but I am merely making distinctions.

And I personally find the “illegal entries” all the more brave for stepping forward, in a sense forced by the extremity of their desperation, but stepping up all the same, while the “legal entries” semi-conveniently stay hidden “in the shadows,” and letting the “illegal” ones take all the heat, and mainly simply because they have money and are often white, and so “pass as legal” in the US.

(I’m bi-racial, Dutch-Indonesian, courtesy of 350 years of Dutch colonization of Indonesia, and have been racially profiled plenty in the US, besides having been gender profiled on top, through “stop and frisk” routines by the police included. In other words, in my experience Donald Trump isn’t the only “pussy grabber” in power.)

And if it is still not clear from these distinctions between the two groups of undocumented immigrants, a lot of the 7 million left behind are in reality not Mexican or even Latin, but rather Asian and not in the least European.

I’m personally estimating, (based on numerous articles and books I’ve read and I have no way of knowing any exact numbers,) that potentially up to half or more of the 7 million come from countries somewhat similar to mine, The Netherlands, like Germany, England, France, Italy, basically all of Western Europe, besides also Australia and most likely China, Korea and Japan, (the latter three Asian countries having an enormous international student presence at a lot of universities in the US.)

Having lived mostly in a youth hostel in Venice Beach for the initial couple of years after my arrival in 1992 I became acquainted with primarily fellow Europeans, including many who were trying to break into the music and film industry, besides modeling and bodybuilding, and I routinely witnessed Arnold Schwarzenegger strolling out of the Gold’s Gym with an entourage of undocumented bodybuilders and aspiring actors, many of whom were staying at the hostel I resided as well. This was during the 1990s and after the rise of Schwarzenegger in the mainstream entertainment industry post-“Terminator,” also followed by Jean-Claude Van Damme (from Belgium) and Dolph Lundgren (from Sweden,) and well before 9/11, when such things were still discussed rather casually.

I also know there are a good number of Irish undocumented people in the US, which is rarely mentioned in the media as well, and as there were a good amount of Irish undocumented people at my work places in the Netherlands, escaping the IRA (Irish Republican Army) bombings in Ireland in the 1980s. These were in fact the first undocumented people I had ever heard of, as some of my co-workers explained their situations to me, after taking me out to see “Dances With Wolves” in 1990.

In the Netherlands I actually grew up surrounded by Americans, as the Netherlands has an enormous American population, especially in Amsterdam where I’d spend my weekends. I worked along Americans and there were even a few in my High School in the town of Leiden. They were at my father’s sports club, and we also had Americans in our family and friends circle.

Many of our own family had moved permanently to New York after World War II and became American citizens in the 1950s, and my father had worked for the Holland-America cruise ship company as a steward in his younger years around that same time and so had been to the US many times. At age 13 I took my first trip to the US, to visit my great aunt who lived permanently in San Francisco and worked for a rich couple, Dutch Jews who had become American citizens after the war as well.

The Americans were never undocumented, that I’d heard of anyway, but weren’t ever referred to as immigrants neither. They were referred to as expats and their immigration was simply called moving, as in moving to the Netherlands from the US.

And they certainly never hid their motivations for moving to the Netherlands neither, benefits were always a huge part of it, as in a great Dutch healthcare system and the ease with which they could be dual citizens and take advantage of our Dutch system, travel easily throughout Europe from there, as Europe had an open border system long before the European Union was formed even.

And I think that idea of the Euro Rail Pass (eurorail or eurail) would freak the US government out completely. The Euro Rail Pass is a pass with which you can travel cheaply by train to about 30 different countries in as little as 30 days and seemed almost designed for thrill seekers but is actually a bit of a necessity in a continent where whole countries are smaller than most individual states in the US.

Of course I had to experience this too but it’s certainly not the ideal way to truly discover other countries and cultures and I ended up revisiting a lot of the countries in order to do it right/or better. I backpacked my way through Europe in my teens, picked up odd jobs along the way, and resided in Morocco for several months with my Moroccan neighbors from back in the Netherlands. I would spend many weekends in Paris, where there were also plenty of Americans, (as Paris and all of France has a long history of Americans residing there as well,) and visit Jim Morrison’s grave at Pere Lachaise to pay my respects. None of this was ever a problem in regards to paperwork, which was always super simple and fast to acquire.

(I imagine it would have potentially been easier for Latin people to claim asylum status in the Netherlands than it would in the US, but I never saw a real Latin presence back home. I also imagine things have gotten a lot more anti-immigrant in Europe as well post 9/11, and after the numerous attacks on European soil, and now especially after the Syrian refugee crisis. Even back in the 1980s the Muslim Moroccan and Turkish legal “guest workers,” Europe’s equivalent of Latin agricultural workers, were met with a lot of hostility, and there has always been a neo-Nazi presence, in the form of skinheads, and religious rightwing groups, even in the liberal Netherlands.)

Generally everywhere I went, and including back home in Amsterdam there would be the obligatory jokes about legal marijuana and legal prostitution, by foreigners exclusively. Americans in particular loved that about the Netherlands and when I first saw T-shirts stating “Just Say No To Drugs,” hanging in the windows on Hollywood Boulevard even, I was utterly confused and somewhat secretly amused. I didn’t know they were dead serious here. I got a lot of jokes and not so funny comments thrown my way in the US for being Dutch, always regarding marijuana and prostitution. (I realize the US “war on drugs” was also geared towards hard drugs but marijuana is definitely included and considered a serious offense here.)

The Netherlands is known the world over for primarily these three things, legal marijuana, legal prostitution and a great healthcare system, besides things like Gouda cheese and tulips and windmills and things like that.

In 2001 the Netherlands also became known for being the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage, and not so incidentally became the home to even more Americans, DOMA victims basically, or “love exiles” as they were dubbed, (sort of a more romantically sounding term in my opinion, although in a bittersweet sort of way.)

(I’ve been using the term LGBTQ exclusion by the way but technically same-sex marriage still does not imply the inclusion of bi-sexual, transgender and gender nonconforming people, who in the US immigration system face added obstacles getting past the Immigration Marriage Fraud Act immigration interviews to establish the validity of their marriage, as the validity of their own personhood comes into question.)

And lastly, the Netherlands also has a longstanding, unique relationship with the US, (dating back to New York being previously a Dutch colony, New Amsterdam, and so tied in to the ugly history of the transatlantic slave trade as well,) and gives US citizens enormous tax breaks for setting up businesses in the Netherlands.

The Dutch and the Europeans at large have also included the US into the European Union’s official open border contract, the Schengen Contract, and which normally includes countries only of the European Union itself.

I am fully aware of my privilege in my current US immigration situation, as a citizen of the Netherlands and a member of the European Union, even if bi-racial, and so brown, or even light skinned brown or something like it, but necessarily Mexican in California, and subjected to racial profiling here, and do not wish to scapegoat those amongst the 11 million who entered the US without inspection versus those who entered legally, and obviously paid for all the costs associated with obtaining a visa. (Tourist visas are however visa waivers and the most easily to overstay and the hardest to track down.)

It cost me personally around $15.000 up front to acquire a student visa, (two school semesters paid in full, at out-of-state tuition rates and with full-time enrollment required, obligatory health insurance from my own country upon coming here, proof of living costs for several school semesters covered, and the English TOEFL tests and biometrics, which included a health exam.)

Of course a lot of the “illegal entries” lost all their money to the very people who smuggled them across the borders, “coyotes,” and so either way we all lost a lot of money in this, but to continuously be clumped together in one big mass confusion of myths by the media and to be portrayed as a “border crosser,” who necessarily came to the US as a refugee, and poor, and to seek benefits specifically is particularly insulting to someone who comes from a country with some of the best benefits in the world, and which attracts Americans to move to the Netherlands instead.

No refugee comes to the US seeking benefits because the US simply does not give benefits to undocumented foreigners, or even temporary legal ones, like tourists or students or temp workers. Refugees come here for safety and, like any other immigrant, to build a normal life, and they contribute a great deal to the US economy. I simply cannot walk around in Los Angeles anymore without noticing all the hard working Latin construction workers, kitchen workers and gardeners, legal or not, and simply do not see white people work those jobs. Not because Latin people stole those jobs, (jobs are not owned anyway, so cannot technically be stolen, and one’s job can just as easily be replaced by a machine, just as my job for years as a box office ticket sales person at the art house movie theater chain The Laemmle Theatres is nowadays largely replaced by websites like Eventbrite,) but white Americans simply seek better paying, easier jobs and their education affords them that.

All foreign workers pay income taxes, legal ones and undocumented ones alike. We are excluded from benefits, but not from taxes, (I’ve paid medicare taxes for years but cannot cash in on them. Uncollected benefits simply end up being US government money, to be given out as grants to US non-profits and things like that, and very ironically.)

And besides this it is extremely insulting above all to be called a criminal and a rapist in the current media, while I actually qualify for US citizenship through the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA,) as the victim of crime and rape at the hands of US citizens.

My first US citizen husband, (I’ll call him E.B. here, one of the co-writers of the first “Fast and Furious” film,) has gotten away clean and has left my second US citizen husband exclusively with all the mess he initiated by pressuring me into an immigration marriage to satisfy his sexual needs.

My second, and still current husband of 9 years, has taken a lot of aggression out on me, not in the least because of the situation I was already in, which he was fully aware of before marrying me, as well as my open lesbian identity, which he simply invalidated as real, just like the US government has done for so many years.

Technically I simply qualify for immediate legalization through spousal sponsorship, which he never started because I am gay. And so my lesbianism has only counted as real when it comes to the immigration interview.

(He has lived with me since 1995, so going on 21 years now and in primarily my living quarters, currently my film production office in Los Angeles, and has by now come around on my immigration situation and sexual orientation and gender identity and is actually trying to find a solution with me, in the process losing all of his extremely religious, anti-LGBTQ family.)

Lastly, and to finish off this piece, it has been exasperating having to witness 50 states battle it out for a whole 11 years to legalize same-sex marriage in the US, (with the added Proposition 8 ordeal in California where I reside,) while the Netherlands got this ordeal over with in one clean swipe even before 9/11, in April of 2001, and of course completely overshadowed in the international media by the US tragedy.

And the Netherlands did it properly on top, through Congress legislation and not the voting ballot, as putting human rights of a minority group on a voting ballot for the majority to decide on, in the name of democracy, is simply unconstitutional.

(PS: I am obviously aware that the “legal” I referred to in this article’s title does not apply to having current legal status, as in Legal Permanent Residency or US citizenship. I have used it here solely to distinguish between those who entered the US with inspection and with valid paperwork as opposed to those who did not.)