Senator Chuck Schumer of New York has said he will introduce a comprehensive immigration reform bill early this year.  A window is opening to pass UAFA.   Please send a personalized appeal to your Senators to stand with our families at this critical moment.

Please take action now to contact your Senators to urge them to tell Schumer:  comprehensive immigration reform is not comprehensive if it does not include UAFA and LGBT families!

Even if you have called and sent a letter before, please send one again!  The time for members of Congress to hear that this is important to their constituents is NOW.

Step 1 - Write both of your Senators.

• Click here to send a letter to your Senators.
• Please, please customize and personalize your letters — especially if you are a New Yorker. A customized letter will have much, much greater weight.
• At the top, explain why inclusion of UAFA and lesbian and gay families in comprehensive immigration reform is so important to you, your family, friends, and community.

Step 2 – Call both of your Senators.

• After you send your letter, please also call your Senators’ offices.
• Call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask for your Senator (you can tell them your state and they can tell you who your Senators are).
• Tell your senator:

“Senator Schumer has said he will introduce a comprehensive immigration reform bill early this year.  I urge Senator _______ [your Senator’s name] to tell Senator Schumer to support inclusion of gay and lesbian families and the Uniting American Families Act in his bill.  Comprehensive immigration reform is not comprehensive unless it includes ALL families.”

NOTE: New Yorkers calling Senator Schumer should amend this script.  Urge Senator Schumer to include gay and lesbian families and the Uniting American Families Act in his bill.

• Then call the Switchboard again and repeat with your other Senator.

I’ve written before about immigration reform. This legislation will allow GLBT Americans to sponsor their same-sex partners for permanent visas, the same way that married straight people can now. As one half of a binational lesbian couple, I strongly encourage all of our readers to take the few minutes necessary to reach out to their senators about the Uniting American Families Act.

American, Canadian, and European Union citizens must realize the tremendous privilege we have in being able to travel all over the world, often without restrictions or even a visa. Until a few years ago, Americans didn’t even need a passport to cross the Mexican border. The same is certainly not true for Mexicans trying to visit the United States. Indeed, several of my Mexican friends are unable to visit me in New York despite my enthusiastic invitation. Although they have no intention of immigrating, they can’t get a tourist visa because their jobs in Mexico aren’t considered “good enough” to prevent them from staying in the United States. Similarly, the privileges that American ex-pats living in Mexico experience, learning from living in a foreign country, earning money legally or picking up odd jobs here and there, don’t extend to Mexicans living in the United States, who face impossibly long waiting lists for green cards and other means of legal residency.

Any American who has ever bought a product made by inexpensive labor in Mexico or otherwise passively benefited from NAFTA should realize that “free trade” and the gap it has widened between Mexico’s rich and poor contribute to increasing immigration from Mexico. (For a good book about the blended economies of Mexico and the United States, check out Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration by Douglas S. Massey, which is available through Macha Mexico’s tiendita.) More specifically, any tourist to Mexico has to realize that much of what she enjoys about Mexico—the strength of the dollar against the peso, the picturesque “quaintness” of impoverished villages—is a part of the same economic landscape that forces many Mexicans to emigrate north.

In light of all this, I believe that any American tourist to Mexico should support reforming immigration laws in the United States to create more pathways to legalization. I feel particularly strongly that the queer people and women who make up the primary audience of this blog, who have themselves experienced what it is like to feel invisible, to feel underrepresented in the country in which you live, need to add their voices to the growing chorus of those calling for more just immigration reform.

Although I believe that the United States needs broad immigration reform across immigrant populations, as half of a bi-national lesbian couple and as the teacher of many undocumented high school students, I can recommend two good places to start: the DREAM Act and the Uniting American Families Act (UAFA).

For those who don’t know, the DREAM Act is a piece of legislation that would create pathways for undocumented minors to legalize their immigration status independent of their parents’ status.  In the years I have worked as a high school teacher, I’ve had the privilege of meeting many students whose immigration status prevents them from receiving the financial aid they desperately need to attend college, despite being some of the brightest and hardest working students I’ve taught. The DREAM Act allows undocumented young people who arrived in the United States before the age of 16 and who have been living there for at least five years to gain permanent resident status by finishing two years of college or military service, during which they can work through federal work-study programs. Although the DREAM Act has been slowly gaining support since it was first introduced (under a different name) in 2001, there is no guaratee that it will pass. To learn more about the bill and the issues at hand, as well as how your senator is likely to vote, visit the DREAM Act Portal, an online community for undocumented students. To get involved in helping pass the DREAM Act, visit dreamact2009.com.

The other piece of immigration legislation that is close to my heart is the Uniting American Families Act, which, if passed, will allow American citizens and permanent residents to sponsor their same-sex partners for visas, the same way heterosexual people do for their spouses. Even though some states allow same-sex marriage, because of the Defense of Marriage Act, the federal government (including the Department of Homeland Security, which handles immigration) defines marriage as being between a man and a woman, leaving bi-national gay couples in an unfortunate position. This is an issue which has received a lot of press recently, such as the feature article in this month’s issue of the Advocate, and the well-publicized case of Shirley Tan, the California mother of two who has had her deportation delayed only by private emergency bill. (Tan’s testimony in front of the senate judiciary committee can be read here.)

Organizations such as Immigration Equality (formerly the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Rights Task Force) and the National Center for Lesbian Rights have done a lot of excellent work pushing for the passage of the UAFA (as well as advocating for GLBT people in many other areas of immigration, including assylum cases and the recent repeal of the HIV travel ban). Making a donation to either of these organizations is one way to show your support for bi-nation gay families (like ours).

However, there are many other ways to get involved. Currently, New York senator Chuck Schumer is drafting comprehensive immigration reform legislation, which he says will be finished by Labor Day. It would be a wonderful thing if the Uniting American Families Act were included in this comprehensive legislation. Now is an excellent time to write to senator Schumer as well as your local senators and representatives and express your support for bi-national gay families. A good template for writing your letter as well as more suggestions for how to get involved can be found on the Immigration Equality website.

Of course, neither of these specific bills deals with the larger issue of immigration reform, which is desperately needed as neo-liberal policies (as well as domestic economic policies, such as farm subsidies) continue to undermine the economies of developing countries such as Mexico. I encourage those readers with the privilege to travel the world and reap the benefits that globalization has offered them to educate themselves about the causes of immigration and to use their voices to support fair immigration reform.

What's missing from this picture? (Answer: The United State's appetite for illegal drugs and legal guns.)

Anyone who follows the American news media’s coverage of Mexico recently knows that the news hasn’t been pretty. The peso is trading weakly against the dollar, making daily life harder for Mexico’s middle class and near impossible for Mexico’s poor. (The recent exchange rate has been between 13 and 15 pesos to the dollar. Good for those paid in dollars. Bad for everyone else.) Perhaps more alarming to tourists, recent weeks have brought dozens of articles about the gruesome violence associated with drug trafficking and the cartels that control the drug trade in Mexico.

Among this influx of bad news, there have been several interesting articles about Mexico that aim to help keep this kind of bad news in perspective.

The first was by our own Anahi Parra, on the blog Latina Lista where she writes about the idea of Mexico as a “surrealist country” and the role that both the United States and Mexican governments play in creating the surreal images (decapitations, etc.) that we see now. She lets neither government off the hook, “since both of them have built up the whirlwind that we witness now.”

In the New York Times, Mexican historian Enrique Krauze’s March 23rd op-ed piece warns readers not to buy into the recent references to Mexico as a “failed state,” highlighting Mexico’s achievements over the past century and pointing out the danger of this rhetoric on both sides of the border. He similarly calls for consideration of the United States’ role in Mexico’s current problems,

Washington should support Mexico’s war against the drug lords — first and foremost by recognizing its complexity. The Obama administration should recognize the considerable American responsibility for Mexico’s problems. Then, in keeping with equality and symmetry, the United States must reduce its drug consumption and its weapons trade to Mexico. It will be no easy task, but the United States has at least one advantage: No one thinks of it as a failed state.

Then, just last week I noticed travel writer Christine Delsol’s article in the San Francisco Chronicle asking potential tourists to Mexico to read “Between the Headlines.” After acknowledging the chilling 7,300 deaths that have been associated with the drug trade in the past two years, she contextualizes these murders in a broader picture of Mexican safety:

While these alarming numbers aren’t exaggerated, the risk to tourists visiting Mexico definitely is. The latest comprehensive data available from the United Nations Survey of Crime report Mexico’s overall murder rate as 13 per 100,000 people, compared with 4 per 100,000 in the United States. An estimated 90 percent of Mexico’s murders are specifically drug-related — not U.S.-style mall shootings, schoolyard massacres or road rage — and concentrated in five of its 31 states, leaving the rest of the country freer of crime than most of the United States.

Perhaps her analysis will be helpful to those thinking of visiting or moving to Mexico in the near future, and have been warned by countless coworkers and relatives not to do so. (For another thoughtful interpretation of crime and safety in Mexico City, read the “Who’s Afraid of Mexico City?” chapter of David Lida’s book First Stop in the New World.)

What drew me to compile these three articles here is the way they all acknowledge that Mexico and its problems do not exist in a vacuum. Looking at any “Mexican problem” (“Mexican crime,” “Mexican poverty”) without a broad (read: multi-national) lens teaches us very little about the problem at hand and even less about Mexico. We can see the consequences of this kind of narrow thinking in the Obama administration’s recent move to station hundreds of additional agents at the U.S.-Mexico border. This sort of muscle-flexing is a short-sighted non-solution to a much larger and more complex problem, and will no doubt further endanger those immigrants pushed to cross in even more remote stretches of the border.  Although I was impressed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s admission that “our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” I remain disappointed by the new administration’s business-as-usual approach to Mexico and its people.

I welcome comments about these articles, safety and violence in Mexico, U.S. Mexico relations, and anything else this post might have stirred up!