New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler is
featured in a new documentary about gay couples kept apart because of
their immigration status.
In the film, titled Law Dividing
Love and produced by Jackie Linge, Nadler talks about the need
for gay-inclusive immigration reform.
“Because we don't have gay marriage,
a gay couple or a lesbian couple are not married and therefore if one
is a foreigner cannot sponsor that person to come to this country
under the immigration law,” Nadler says. “When you get a
situation where two partners – two lovers – are kept apart. And
that's cruel. It is gratuitously cruel. And by gratuitously cruel,
I mean cruel for no rational or necessary purpose.”
Also appearing in the film is Rachel B.
Tiven, executive director of Immigration
Equality, a group that lobbies on behalf of gay immigrants.
“We know from the 2000 census that
approximately 36,000 LGBT bi-national couples were living in the
United States,” she says. “It's a lot of gay people to be really
suffering only because they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or
transgender.”
Nadler is the sponsor of the Uniting
American Families Act (UAFA), a bill that would allow gay Americans
to sponsor an immigrant partner for citizenship.
The UAFA has been tucked inside several
comprehensive immigration reform proposals to the consternation of
social conservatives who have called the measure a back door to gay
marriage.
“It tries to redefine traditional
marriage. I can't support that,” Utah Representative Jason
Chaffetz told Fox News.
“Simply if one of us was a man we
would be getting married and I would have a green card based on
that,” says Nadine in the film. “We cannot even get married. We
cannot actually marry because they are going to take my visa away and
kick me out the U.S. if we do that.” (The video is embedded in the
right panel of this page.)
The
prospects of altering the immigration law look bleak after voters
handed over the reins of the House to Republicans and increased the
number of Republicans in the Senate on November 2.