Get Used to It: Ep. 19, "Immigrants"

uh [Music] so [Music] welcome to get used to it today we're going to be talking a little bit about gay and lesbian immigrants people who have left their homes left the families that they know left the cultures that they know and come to america and we're going to talk to some people who have had some experience with that our guests today are robert foss who is a staff attorney with el rescate which is a legal services center for central americans he's also a member of the coalition for humane immigrant rights of los angeles he also does fabulous drag well he'll talk a little bit about that later on to his left is fernando gutierrez and fernando is a member of the staff at kara akara and kara akara is a community-based latino aid service organization and fernando is a community outreach worker and our third guest today is jenny lee and jenny is an art student graduating this year from cal state long beach welcome all of you thank you jenny let me start with you um where are you originally from i'm originally from mainland china uh i like to add a little bit that i'm belong to an asian lesbian organization called lapis yeah what's left i stand for to tell you truth i don't quite remember let me let me help you with that one lapis is um i think it's lost um los angeles asian pacific islander sisters yeah i think so i think right all the different all the different letters are hard i i'm so you're from the people's republic of china when did when did you come to the united states i came here in 1980 so you've been here for wow 14 years now yeah yeah i was 19 or 12 you know near 20 almost 20. 20 years old when you came yeah were you out as a lesbian back in china no no no no you know i was so repressed and i had no idea that i was listening even all my life i had so much interest in women and and i all just to consider that oh i'm idealizing i won't be that beautiful i won't be that feminine because in my country it's so conservative and homosexuality was never mentioned and i don't have any knowledge whatsoever about it and and you know our culture at that time at least was preached us to not to date until 25 which is about age to get married 25 years old right 25 years old and you weren't supposed to date until 25 years old yeah okay and i was preached that way you know so i was nice girl i obey the rules pretty well you know so i didn't date and the the ones dated especially during high school time or really look down as immoral yeah there were a couple of kids in my high school classroom they were looked down they were looked down because they sneaked out dating they were dating um the opposite sex they were they were yeah they were opposite sex right okay and they were considered very immoral yeah and thinking about almost you know homosexual ones and yeah so i was very very repressed i had a very little knowledge about homosexuality when i was there it's very very close even now they you know probably still very close because a few years ago when i read chinese newspaper and there was news about an accused lesbian she was killed immoral with lesbian behavior and she was sentenced to prison for some time so she was arrested and sent away then right she was arrested and sentenced to the prison and that's a few years ago i don't know now i hope they're more open wow that's that's that that's incredible um does the does the party does the communist party have a position about about uh gay men and lesbians is there an official policy about it no there's no official policy simply not talked about yeah so you didn't talk about being being a lesbian with your friends or your your family or anybody no no at that time i had no idea that i am and if they were people that i've met that they are nobody have spoke to me at least it's very very closeted in china if they were to find out that you were a lesbian maybe they would arrest you but what else would they do would you would you would they throw you out of school would you lose your job what would happen if they if they knew you were a lesbian um you mean i assume because i don't really know and but then with our social constructor is that the minimum is that we're gonna be shamed we're going to be so ashamed we probably want to move out of the community wow go to somewhere nobody knows that i am you know but even if you were to leave now you're from you're from peking right so even if you were to leave peking and go someplace else like shanghai or canton or something you would still have the same problem there if people find out about it right oh yeah yeah probably worse you know picking is most open because of the capital it's capital yeah fernando if i can just sort of touch base with you a little bit um now where are you where are you from originally original i was born in guatemala and then um i was raised in mexico guadalajara city so you you were born there but then your family went lived in guadalajara yeah how long did you live in guadalajara for like um 18 years 18 years guadalajara is very famous in some ways both because of how active the gay life is but also how tight the government is what was it like for you being being gay in guadalajara well for me at first it was kind of hard because um when i started discovering that i was i was attracted to a man or i was seeing another person another gay man uh i was very scary it was pretty scary and um also uh i come from i grew up with a stepfather my stepfather at that time he's a typical mexican macho and uh it was kind of hard for me i was like to to be gay it was even i have a hard time leading with myself be gay or be men or be a macho man it was kind of really hard now did your stepfather know that you were gay i don't i didn't have idea that was it was knocking me all the time it was so if you were living there you were were you going out did you have did you have a lover did you have boyfriends do you know when i when i live with my with my stepfather no well you know i used to go to the school far away from home and but never had boyfriend i had friends but my friends they i don't consider them gay because they supposed to be stray or there was a stray friends that you still have so you didn't talk to to your friends even about being gay no nobody now you knew about yourself though i know about yeah but you didn't you didn't talk to anyone no i was afraid because even like i wasn't telling nobody about my my uh myself feeling gay or be i talked to a man and uh sometimes in the street uh you know my guy called me hey it or marry corn or thing like that i was mad because i want to be respect and uh i was i was have to have to act like a straight man and be so much or and or trying to be so much so did you didn't have any boyfriends or anything like that at all in mexico no until i was 18. okay because you heard jenny say for example that there was a woman who was discovered in china and then they arrested her in guadalajara in mexico mexico what would happen if you were an out gay man what would life be like well you know the police is it depends if you are in a public area the police always gonna come to you and trying to harassing you and um but if you're a gay man but you're not so out to the public you're kind of gaming but quietly and you don't want nobody to know that you're gay maybe you don't have that much problems because even the people any people if you they see you on the street they they they trying to to screaming to you or tell you you know bad words like hotel maricon trying to hurt you mentally physically and and it was kind of hard so when you were living in mexico you weren't really out no really now have you now that you are out here have you gone back to mexico recently yeah last year and you went back as an out gay man right yeah more or less what was life like in mexico this time when you went to visit but it was great i enjoyed it more opening yeah i enjoyed i have friends over there now and i know they are gay and you know i hang around with them and they know another gay man and it was easy for me to get involved with the gay community over there to know more people who identify germs like as a gay as a gay man and i spent the whole i've been well i was for a week only i don't want to say more than that and um but very nice week it was a nice week i enjoyed it really nice yeah i i was it was different it was different this time but i don't know uh because i spent the whole week with my friends and with my family and i don't spend you know to go out that much i've been to a party but all people are gay or in the party i don't have that much problem so did you go to bars and things like that in mexico this time no no incredible so mostly with your friends yeah okay yeah now jenny you when you haven't been back to china for a long time yeah i was back in china in 1983. okay i'm guessing why don't you tell me i'm assuming that there aren't bars there aren't gay and lesbian bars in china not that i know did you go back and look no at the time i was still straight yeah i i'm only about out about three years okay yeah so bob i want to bring you into this i know that um you've done a lot of traveling yourself you've been you've visited a lot of countries throughout colombia for three years and i've visited el salvador and guatemala frequently during the last decade tell me what it's like being queer in any of those countries i mean i i realize that you know your experience as both as an american and as a visitor might be somewhat limited but what was it what were your observations about well actually i had a very interesting experience in colombia because um i really came out of the closet in colombia i had gone to live in colombia i had been aware of my attraction to men before that but um but i hadn't really come to the conclusion that this was my sexual orientation and and so that's what happened to me in colombia um and i was living in bogota and bogota on that level is a very gay city although sexual orientation is constructed very differently in latin culture on the one hand as fernando was saying it's a very macho culture and and i think colombia like mexico can be very repressive and very machista in that regard on the other hand lots of um and i can speak only for men but lots of men are having sex with other men without necessarily identifying themselves as gay and so it creates a little bit of a dichotomy and of course there's a lot of violent repression on the one hand and a lot of expressed sexuality on the other hand um one of the biggest problems in colombia of course is the um what they call the social cleansing death squads and there's a whole tradition of repression of undesirable social elements probably going back to the violence of the 50s where street children were rounded up and shot by elements of the national police these death squads i mean that sounds like an organized group of people that go out to do this yes is that what that is um yeah there are several groups one of them called mas muertes questradores they they have various names um or the committee of social cleansing committee de limbiaceae it's a very fascist sounding name but but in fact these groups and i think you'll find in the human rights reports um from amnesty international pox christie and some of the other reports um that these death squads are made up of elements of the national police and other paramilitary groups which are carrying out the um the oligarchy's policy of cleansing the streets of transvestites homosexuals street children prostitutes and so on how active are they are they are they out there every night or or how active are they um i i saw one report from 1990 that suggested there were as many as 300 of this kind of social cleansing assassination in the year 1990 alone yeah and that's between kali medin and bogota the three major cities where where this kind of activity takes place that's incredible is it is that is there common knowledge in colombia that there are that there are death squads out there that are targeting gay men or or lesbians or transvestites does anyone know about this yeah people know about it but usually the um the mainstream liberal press and i mean liberal as identified with the liberal party of colombia um will highlight the political aspects of these killings because of course during the same period 400 members of the union patriotica leftist political party were also assassinated so there's a lot of other kinds of death going on in colombia what about you mentioned other countries in south america that you've that you've been to i guess el salvador um el salvador is an interesting case um we are currently representing a young salvadoran in his claim for political asylum based on his sexual orientation and his asylum claim is based on persecution by by members of the military who knew that he was homosexual in el salvador in el salvador and he was harassed and threatened with death and fled um currently that case was denied in the um in the hearing process and is now on appeal um canada has granted the asylum requests of two salvadorans based on sexual orientation so this is a new thing that's happening now more and more people are recognizing that this kind of persecution is um is definitely a human rights violation i want to be i want to get to to asylum a little bit later but in terms of what you're what you hear from the different clients that you have as well some of your own observations what what's the nature of gay society in these other countries like like colombia like el salvador is it is it as out as it is here is it are there bars are people are people very active in the community is there an organized community there's a community yes and it looks differently in different countries i would say in in colombia for example um there are bars but um more on the nature of private clubs people are very circumspect about who they let into the bars because of fear and so on um also because again of the different social construction of sexuality in latin america i think there's an element of the gay community that's way more out than anything we see in this country um you know and it kind of overlaps with a sort of transgender community and since the gender roles are so so highly defined that people adapt to certain gender roles um based on you know sexual orientation and then there's also communities evolving that have a more what i would call north american or european gay identity and so there's it's very wide open in some ways even in the middle of all of this repression it's a very fascinating and interesting scene i think after we come back from our break i'd like to talk a little bit about that in terms of how some of those communities seem to be more open even though the culture is more repressive and after we come back we'll talk a little bit about that [Music] some of us must choose between food or medicine between a coat on our backs or a roof over our heads but if you're 65 or older or disabled supplemental security income is designed to help call [Music] back to get used 1-800-953-8555 it today we are talking about gay men and lesbians from other countries immigrants who have left their countries to come to the united states the contrast of life in those countries as well as here with us today are uh robert foss and fernando gutierrez and jenny lee just before the break we were talking a little bit about how in some countries in latin america even though gay life there is much more repressed there are certain values and certain things that are almost more out more open than here i think you were talking about that a little bit robert why don't you expand on that for us well for example in the transgender community it's not unusual actually in some latin american towns for a transvestite to live out openly in the community and a person who chooses that option faces well a lot of cruel rejection but at the same time a certain amount of respect and acceptance and it's almost a mirror image other places in certain indigenous cultures for example some of the indigenous communities of panama there's a lot of openness about people with different sexual orientations who live openly and in the community either in a transgender kind of way or a more typical gay or lesbian lifestyle those things are are accepted so there's a lot of openness even in the midst of repression it's um it's a very fascinating sort of social context now for those of for the two of you who have left your homes and come to the united states i'm sure that there have been a lot of there are a lot of contrasts for you it's real different here probably i'm assuming that it's real different here than what it was like where you're where you're originally from fernando you were originally from guatemala and and are from you live most of your life in mexico um now that you're here when did you come here two three years ago uh actually four years four years ago after you got here what was the thing that impressed you most about gay life here that's very interesting um well the liberty liberty you have uh actually the labor you have in west hollywood but west west west hollywood is a special place a special place no because if you uh go around doing whatever you do here to silver lake area or to a downtown area you get kill for that but actually this is a special place so when you came four years ago did you move directly to west hollywood or were you in in in monterey park or were you no well actually but the first uh i went to downtown l.a i was at the 23rd street i was living there for like actually for three months and then i moved to west hollywood so what what was your impression of west hollywood how did it feel to be here after having left guadalajara well it was full nice feels great um i feel uh i felt free because i can be my that was the place i was looking for to be myself and that was this was the place that i can do whatever i want to do and nobody was gonna look in me and you know in a bad way or say something bad to me or i can be myself over here it was i feel different you know you know one of the things that a lot of gay men i i can't speak for lesbians but certainly for gay men once they first come out they go through this period of like um being very active socially shall we say they're just out there every night you know you see them over at the different bars you see them playing they may go to the bath houses they may go to the sex club they may date a lot of different people because when they first come out they're they're free for the first time and they're enjoying that in guadalajara you were never out when you came here did you go through a period of like going crazy um kind of yeah friday saturday and sunday for like a year and but i i usually have a group of friends and every weekend starting friday saturday and sunday we go out every night and we go back together we go out together we go back together and it was really nice it was it was a decreasing go dance all night for three four hours actually was a good exercise well now you you mentioned for example that when you went to visit guadalajara recently you know you had some friends there and there was this little group that you spent time with and you said here when you when you go out in west hollywood there's a little group of friends so you you've created like a little community little family for yourself yes um do you find that that that that community here that that little group of friends that you have is like a new family for you kind of yeah kind of feel i feel like i have i'm here by myself and but the only thing i have here is my my friends and i felt like a part of this family now do you miss your family back home yes i do yeah i always go back someday do you do you talk to them about what you do here yeah actually i i called my mother last friday and i call her and type tell her whatever i do here and and let her know do you tell her about your boyfriend and no actually i tell my friends she knows that you're out now right yeah yeah but uh um like when i went there i talked to her like oh look at the cute boy over there and she was like hi mikko like she was like oh like she don't want to really she accept me but she don't really want to talk about it and she doesn't want she knows she knows who you are now but she's not she doesn't sound that comfortable with it not yet but i hope in the future she's going to feel better jenny you know i'm chinese myself of course my family's been here a long time but family is like in the latino culture for chinese family is everything and you know fernando sounds lucky because his mom seems to acknowledge him she may not want to talk about it much but she acknowledges him now that you're here in the united states what's your relationship like with your family well i see me after i come out right i mean well i guess the first question is do they know uh yeah i have two sisters and my i told them i haven't told my mother although my mother always accusing me that jenny you're moving like a man jenny you don't dress like lady you know i haven't told her you know my major concern is she's over 60 i don't want to trigger any health issue and also because i told my two sisters i have hard enough time from them your sisters give you a bad time oh yes they they still haven't completely give up try to convert me back to be straight no are they in china they're here oh my whole family is here oh the whole family is here now oh okay yeah so your sisters know but your mom doesn't yeah and your sisters haven't been very supportive what kind of things do they say and do in fact i i used to be very close friends with my younger sister but ever since this you know gay acu homosexual issue were no longer closed and not only at the beginning they bugged me very much about convert back to be straight and they do it less and less you know but then it is very inconvenient to talk with them they don't they still don't accept homosexuality they just have to accept it because they accept me like me the thing is men it is very unfair you know how woman likes to talk about men right straight women like talk about men let's be able to love talk about women but i can't talk about women because they get very annoyed so you're not free to talk about talk freely with them right i cannot talk freely with them anymore you know and that just pushed me away in a sense do you feel distanced or divorced from your family do you feel like they're not really there for you anymore with one of my sisters yes one of my sister take it better you know but then the other sister just we used to be close friends but now it's just feel like distant stranger decent acquaintance feels like that that's got to be really really hard it's very hard yes fernando mentioned that now that he's here he's got some friends around him that are kind of like a new family do you have a group of friends around you that that kind of take the place of of an uh family yeah i have i have friends that they're very supportive and from a woman arts group and from lapis in asian lesbians and from and my you know i have some old friends like since i was almost as old as being here 13 years old you know and my friends and you know they don't accept homosexuality because they said mean intercept alone you know but they are supportive to me at least it turned out to be friends take it much easier than family family take it the hardest why do you think that family takes it the hardest i think because you know according to them is that i love you so much i want to do the good for you so they want to change you right actually this is good for me i'm so much happier because i'm living according to my own nature now but ananda what about what about you do you do you get the feeling that that your family back in mexico wants to convert you back like your mom no my mom my father my father lives in guatemala and last year he came to visit and he saw me with this little thing over here and he we went to a restaurant we talked and he was so nice and i bring one of my friends with me did you go to a queer restaurant no no i want to but my friend said no no no because he's gonna be scared or something but uh i would i took him to a restaurant and then when he came back to guatemala he wrote a letter to me and and um he i was when at the time i wrote the letter i was i was very sad very i was crying because all the things he wrote to me and it was in a bad way like i'm not his son anymore because the way i wear this and he won a sense who looked very natural because the people are talking about me and he never sends he have another um older son i mean and he have a wife and two kids well he wanted me to be to have kids and to have a wife and i don't want to be that way i like him yeah to be like him and i felt like what's this for i live here and i work and i pay my bills i i think i have a right to decide for myself i want not my mother to suffer me and also my father they can you know they can come to me and tell me what what's good for me what is bad for me but not to to like to give like orders to me i want to take a notice for nobody your dad saw the earring did he ask did he talk to you about being gay or did he just did he just assume that you were gay or did he assume he don't talk to me about it he don't want to talk about it he's christian and like so he he was just going to he was just going to basically put this out there that you're not his son anymore he doesn't want you around because if you're not going to have kids i know yeah and also he wrote a part of the bible uh some part of the bible the gods say feminine having sex with another man you are very uh it's an abomination right and i say oh my my own father writers for me i feel like pushing away like she said i feel like i i have a acceptation for my mother's side but i don't have that for my father's side and the real thing important for me is so what about my mother think i don't care really i i like my father i love my father but i don't really care about my father i feel you know sad because this is my father right but your mother is my mother is more important for me than my father i don't really care about it yeah could i answer that uh the question that how i feel when i first got here you can answer any question you want yeah because it was so different because you know when i was in china you know i was taught a couple should not holding hands in public nor kissing straight straight couple straight couple nor anything beyond okay so when i first got here i saw this straight couple here you know you know kissing holding hands in public uh gross you know yeah tomorrow you know do it be you know do it you know home not in public but you know what this is just how the message we got from the street world right now how were you when you came here and saw that i was about 20. yeah and one thing good about i got here is that i immediately start to heard about homosexuality now from the media right you know but an all-negative stuff you know all this stake unnatural i have normal all that things so that just add to my already set in internalized homophobia so i was still home internalized when we could be i was straight got married all that yeah i think that's really interesting that in china they don't want you to date until you're 25 years old yeah and even when you're dating you can't hold hands you can't kiss in public not in public it sounds like the the chinese the current modern china attitude is very sex negative they they don't like dealing with sex at all now they're much more open you know i mean how how is it possible if they're so sex negative how is it possible to have a billion people in china i mean somebody must be doing it just don't do it in public that's the thing you know that's that's the thing you know you basically don't talk about you know intimate relationship in public do not talk about do not show it you know yeah and yeah now they are much more open yeah remember i was there 14 years ago right now do you when you when you talk to your friends or when you write to your family back there do you get a sense that that how they're dealing with gay men and lesbians is that changing at all well i don't know because i haven't i lost all the contacts because all my family's here yeah but if i go back in i'll find out [Laughter] surely really interesting if you go back oh yeah also can i stand there there's another issue in mexico if you see two women walking in the street holding their hands there's nothing wrong with that right but if you see two mans holding their hands like they're fired and they people's like that's true i think i think there is more acceptance like even in china you see women like you know though you know like but that's just friendship yeah it's not meant to be romantic i think the same thing is true in mexico yeah but a lot of cultures in a woman not i i haven't meant to to neglect you robert um uh do you think that there are uh we only have a little bit of time right now we can kind of lead into the next segment but do you think that there are uh what are your feelings about the difference in contrast between the life gay life here and gay life and some of the countries you've been in i mean is it what's what distinguishes it here i think despite the large amount of repression that that gay people suffer even in the united states um just the experience that these two people have shared with us about their sense of freedom at least we have spaces available for gay and lesbian people to express themselves and and that's true in other countries too um but despite the amount of violence that we have here hate crimes against gays and lesbians there's still compared to some countries more space here for the development of of a public life and a public identity i think that's really true um we will be talking when we get back from the break about how some people are so persecuted in their home countries that they feel that they have to seek political asylum to escape to the united states or some other place that's safer for them so after we get back we'll talk a little bit about that bobby griffith died at the age of 20. he didn't have a disease he wasn't killed in an accident he wasn't involved in gang violence or drugs bobby griffith killed himself because he was gay bobby was raised to believe that homosexuals are perverted people who threaten the well-being of the community and that they should be doomed to eternal damnation when his pastor said it to the congregation he heard his own mother say amen so bobby griffith jumped to his death from a freeway overpass into the path of an oncoming truck bobby griffith's mother is a good christian woman she didn't mean for her son to die so tragically but like so many others she allowed herself to believe the bigotry that led to her young son's death love and support your gay and lesbian children that's what mary griffith would do if only she and bobby could start over [Music] welcome back to uh get used to it but we're talking today about gay and lesbian immigrants during the break the people up in the booth reminded me that i've been very very rude and although i've introduced everybody else here i haven't introduced myself i'm j craig fong and i'm with lambda legal defense and education fund and i am your host today before the break we were talking a little bit about some of the difficulties that gay men and lesbians have in their home countries and how difficult it can be for them there and robert you work at el rescate which is a center for central american refugees are there people who would want to come to the united states because of the repression that they the gay and lesbian repression that they experience in their home countries and come to the united states to escape that yeah there are many people um actually we've had several potential clients interview with us around issues of sexual orientation and we're currently representing one salvadoran man in an asylum case people look for a place where they can be safe whether it's safe from persecution based on political opinion um ethnicity or in this case sexual orientation tell us a little bit about how asylum works i mean how does somebody qualify for asylum to qualify for asylum the person must demonstrate an individualized fear of persecution based on one of the five categories that the law provides race political opinion ethnicity religion or social group now that means i guess that gay men and lesbians would fall into that last category as a as a social group meaning in fact as the case that was recently decided in san francisco of the brazilian man shows that the social group theory of asylum was used for someone to ask for asylum based on their sexual orientation right i mean there was some doubt for a while about whether gay men and lesbians would be considered an identifiable social group for this purpose and that brazilian case said yes we are yeah the brazilian case followed the lead of the canadian refugee board in terms of their decision finding that gays and lesbians were a social group and the san francisco court also agreed with that and agreed that gays and lesbians qualify under american law so this this this um this new the inclusion of gay men and lesbians is part of this united states isn't alone in that then canada is one of the countries that also has done it canada and i understand sweden has also considered cases based on sexual orientation this is a very new thing for the united states because of course until 1990 lesbians and gays were excluded by immigration law that is the power of the united states was used to keep openly gay and lesbian people from crossing the border and while it's a great victory to have won the overturning of that exclusion um i don't think our gain is as secure as it might be because people infected with hiv are still excluded and of course that severely impacts the gay community when we talk about people traveling in and out to conferences and so on so without getting into all of the hiv and immigration issues i think we need to be vigilant about what we've gained in the 1990 law now asylum isn't the only way to come to the united states of course there's the standard way that if you have you know your mother or your father some family member here or a spouse you can also have them petition for you to come to the united states yeah there's family-based immigrant visas based on on the family relationship if you're an immediate relative mother father brother sister of u.s citizen child of a resident or spouse of a citizen or resident you can immigrate based on those relationships now i know that there's a lot of of a lot of people who are interested in different countries they may be living here in the united states somebody from mexico from china from france from italy from a lot of different places who have boyfriends or girlfriends partners here in the united states and they want to get married but of course in the united states two people of the same sex can't get married so people will marry somebody else just just to get a green card i don't know whether or not fernando you know of people i mean you work at kara akara you work with a lot of people who are not from here yeah do you hear stories like this yes i i know also i know some persons who they've been married to a girl a gay man married to a woman a gay man married to a lesbian okay and they get married only for the green card and they live in the same house but this woman lives with his girlfriend and this gay man lives with his own partner and so are there you know at least one couple like this are there i know as in many cases like that just now i i know a few cases they've been doing that aren't they afraid of um are they afraid of getting caught by immigration no no because they live like a normal they have to live there for like three years and then after that they can move away from it and i know uh this uh uh girl she's just lesbian she been married with uh this guy is a straight guy not only gay people do that straight he's uh this guy is mexican and he's married to her is just lesbian but she's from here and they're bored they're both are latinos and um she's living with her girlfriend and he's living with another girl right he's straight yeah he's straight and but they still marry jenny in the in the in the asian community and people that you you see and and talk to at school and things is this kind of thing happening well i personally don't know i do heard those stories yeah and seeing those ads you see where where do you see oh you know gay and lesbian magazines really people are advertising right but i thought the other kind of ads you had in the magazines were for other kinds of services they would explicitly add just for certain certain purpose you know because family will not accept right yeah so we're seeing things like this both in the in the asian community latino community i know that there are people who come to see me at lambda who are from europe and australia who have the same thing they're they're they're from another country and they want to stay here and they'll do anything and so they say well what if i what if i find somebody of the opposite sex to marry i'm not in love with them i'm gay or i'm lesbian but i'll just marry them anyway just to get the green card bob is there a problem with that from the immigration law standpoint well certainly that sort of thing is marriage fraud under the immigration statute and and there are laws in place that allow the ins to investigate these kinds of situations and so people run a terrible risk and in general i wouldn't recommend it i mean i think i can understand um the urgent need to survive that drives many people to make decisions like that and i think we should understand that this is kind of a leftover from the days when we feel marginalized and indeed our own loving committed relationships aren't recognized by law yet so we can't marry and immigrate our spouses in a legal way and so faced with that discrimination i understand why people make those kinds of choices however i think they bring some very severe consequences and just looking toward the future i think that people like that should investigate other ways to immigrate perhaps employment-based visas now that gay and lesbian people are no longer excluded i think there's opening up some new opportunities and and we need the whole gay and lesbian community to support the immigrant sections of the community when they need sponsors for employment-based visas and so on there's things we can do to help each other now we we touched on asylum a little bit we touched on the fact that uh if you have a family member in the united states that person can do a petition to bring you over to get your green card and you mentioned employment based um why don't you spend that out a little bit about how that's done not every sort of offer of employment will qualify for an employment-based visa and and perhaps the most efficient ways to do these are with professional level if you have a college degree if you have a trade if you're outstanding in your field either entertainment or the arts or something like that then the time that you spend on the waiting list is considerably less and those sorts of arrangements are often workable in fact there may even be temporary visas available that allow you to work in the job while your permanent case is pending so the key to the employment based visas are often to have a professional level degree and or a skill that's recognized as being professional level usually the skill has to be pretty unique doesn't it i mean i gather right now especially with a lot of americans unemployed the immigration service isn't going to approve a petition for somebody that's going to take a job away from an american yeah as part of the application process you do have to test the employment market and get what's called the labor certification from the department of labor so not every sort of profession or job or job offer can qualify but in in general the more technical or specialized your field is the better chance you have of that happening so because you have to test the job market and you have to do some advertising before you can even get this immigration visa this employment-based visa approved that's how we know then that uh these people aren't taking a job away from american because there's no american to take that job right after the advertisement has run and if anyone applies for it their qualifications are reviewed so there's a testing of the process so people who immigrate through this way are not taking jobs away from american citizens because it's been shown that that there weren't sufficient people in that sector that particular specialized sector of the economy to fill the job right because i think one of the things that a lot of people worry about they worry about for example that that immigrants are going to take a job from an american but this process helps to demonstrate that at least with respect to this particular job whatever it might be that no american is going to lose is going to lose that job and i think that the job market in los angeles shows that there are many many jobs available people talk about the um the factors that draw people to come to this country in an undocumented way and if those jobs didn't exist then people wouldn't come so so clearly there are jobs available now fernando in the people that you work with over at kara akara there's a lot of folks i would imagine especially from from certain countries where they may not have a college degree and can't take advantage of some of the things that robert was talking about and maybe like you you know your mom is is down there your family is down there these people don't have anybody here in the united states who can do an application for them do you see a lot of people that that don't qualify for either family or for employment um i work with the undocumented but a lot of these people they some then they have a profession some there are doctors some of their teachers some of them are co psychologist and they have a profession in their own countries but they came here and they well they have first a barrier this the language right they don't speak actually really good or they even they don't speak anything and um the second barrier is that they don't have uh they're illegal here in this country they don't have papers to work they don't have a green card they don't have a word permission and it's kind of hard to find a job or to qualify even because in the uh if you have a word permission or if you don't have a green card a social security card you don't qualify for any any kind of job that is kind of hard jenny for that for the for the community like where you are with the students and things do you discover that there are lots of people who are trying to qualify for the employment visas or are a lot of people applying based on family what do you see out there well i don't really know i don't know about so for the students the other your fellow students and people that are at the university with you you don't talk about those issues you don't talk about immigration type issues yeah i haven't been for a long time you know because i've been here for 14 years yeah i you know lost lots of thoughts about immigration issues well robert when we come back to some of this there's there's there's family there's asylum there's employment are there any other ways of of getting a green card there are other remedies available one particularly good remedy for certain people would be something called suspension of deportation and this is a defense against deportation so of course it assumes that someone's in a judicial process where there's going to be a decision whether they can stay in the country or not so it's not an application like a form it's not something that you can go in and say oh i'd like to apply for suspension you have to have been detained or placed in deportation proceedings first first okay and suspension of deportation is a remedy it's a defense against that action of deportation how do you qualify for it um to qualify you need residents of at least seven years good moral character which translates into not having a criminal record or having had whatever minor offenses you have expunged from the record and the third requirement is something called extreme hardship which is a very nebulous concept but you basically have to show that either yourself or your u.s citizen or resident relative is going to suffer hardship but not just hardship extreme hardship if you're no longer there now of course the classic situation has been someone who has children born who are us citizens and as you know u.s citizens have certain rights and they have rights to their parents and they will suffer all sorts of trauma if their parents are taken from them but the case law particularly in the ninth circuit says that the immigration court has to consider all the factors and consider them cumulatively so if you look at the comparative economic difference if you look at um the political suffering that someone might undergo in another country versus here all of those things are relevant to determining extreme hardship one very exciting thing and i think um you and i are both looking for cases like this would be to test um a committed relationship between two lesbians or two gay men in this suspension context so the way it would be used is for example that it this couple's been together for seven or eight years they've been living together they're like a little family unit and of course right now we can't get married in the united states so gay men and lesbians can't marry in the united states therefore we want in the suspension of deportation proceeding to have the judge recognize that relationship as if it was a regular marriage yes and and as you know there's a ninth circuit case that recognizes common law marriage right um in this context and and there's other case law recognizing friendship as as relevant to extreme hardship so i i feel that the basis is there illegally to recognize an intimate relationship between two same-sex partners in the same light and certainly as we know the right to have our lovers with us is a very intimate very personal and and very deep part of our lives i think what we've seen today is that there has there's an enormous amount of variety here in terms of how people come to this country what motivates them to come to this country and the fact that people are finding trying to find ways to stay here i want to thank my guests for for coming today and talking about this it's a complicated issue there's a lot more we could say about it i think but i do want to thank robert foss from el rescate and chirla i want to thank fernando gutierrez from kara akara and i want to thank jenny lee who is a student at cal state and is also part of lapis here in los angeles for those of you who do want a little bit more information you will be seeing on your screen momentarily some phone numbers of different organizations throughout los angeles that are available to provide advice and some services to to immigrants i hope that all of you who listen to us and spend some time with us today will take into account the fact that gay men and lesbians are of course we are everywhere and that immigrants people from other countries who have just arrived here especially in los angeles are just like us as gay men and lesbians they are everywhere and i hope that as we begin to take a look at how our community is diverse and as we begin to try to accept those differences and to appreciate those differences that we remember the immigrants among us because they're very brave they've left their homes they've left their families and they've come here to find a better life and they are probably the bravest people and among the best people that their countries have to offer and they're here now and we should welcome them [Music] so [Music] you