Source: Denver Post
Since 1965, U.S. immigration policy has had a clearly stated priority: "family reunification." In the past five years alone, this policy has enabled the legal spouses of 1.3 million Americans to gain permanent legal residency here.

But for the 35,820 U.S. citizens counted by the 2000 census as living with same-gender partners from other countries — nearly half with children — this provision does not apply. If separated, binational gay and lesbian families trying to unify, legally, can face a bureaucratic, heartbreaking and often insurmountable challenge.

Caught in the swirl of two of the most contentious issues on America's docket — domestic-partner rights and immigration reform — many face an impossible choice: Live apart from the person they love, or leave the country they love.

Legislation on both fronts progresses on their behalf, most notably the Uniting American Families Act, which would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to include "permanent partners." Sponsored by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., the bill was reintroduced in May with 87 co-sponsors, including Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo.

In the meantime, they wait and hope, staving off financial ruin, avoiding illegal status and trying to preserve their families.

So, on a Sunday morning in early December, 41-year-old Abbie Green stands next to Sandra Veronica Campuzano Trevizo, her partner of eight years, in their one-bedroom rental in Chihuahua, Mexico, saying can-do things in the face of a policy that has sent them from Phoenix to Vancouver, British Columbia, to Chihuahua in order to make a life together, legally, somewhere. Then she cries.

They had been a couple for four years when they consulted a number of immigration lawyers for a way for Campuzano to stay in the U.S. The news was always the same. Heterosexual married couples can sponsor one another for permanent residency, but U.S. immigration policy doesn't provide recourse for a committed same-gender couple.

"I didn't want her to get a fake Social Security number," says Green. "My anal American brain kept telling me that's a crime, that's illegal, we can't do that. But I think it's illegal that I can't bring my partner here. I think that's the real crime."

"At one in the morning, we began listing the countries that would recognize our relationship for immigration purposes."

Of the five they wrote down, Canada made sense. The language was English. It was closer than Australia.

Their extensive application for residency in Canada came through in January 2006. By July, both were in Vancouver. Green relocated her mother, Virgilia Baldo, 67, and 92-year-old grandmother, Agnes Chamberlain, from Arizona to Salem, Ore., to be nearer.

"The hardest thing for Abbie and Sandra," says Baldo, has been "uprooting themselves from something they absolutely know, having to give up everything and try to go where they can both be. It's turned them into nomads."

But Vancouver, far from both of their homes, presented its own logistical and financial challenges.

In Glasgow, Scotland, David Black -- stopped, detained, turned back at New York's JFK airport in August -- conducts his uprooted life, his strained relationship and much of his Denver real estate business from Glasgow coffee shops that have Wi-Fi service.

Back in Denver, his partner, a U.S. citizen, keeps the business they have together running as he begins contemplating options that would mean leaving the U.S.

A vice president at two different companies, Black had lived and worked in Denver for four years on an H1-B work visa when he first met Joe (he asked that Joe's last name not be used to avoid future immigration problems). They became a couple during Christmas 2001 and began concocting a plan to stay together.

In 2002, Black started buying real estate to fulfill requirements for an E-2, or "investors" visa, granted to those who put a substantial amount into the American economy.

In May, Black returned to the United Kingdom for a required immigration interview with U.S. officials. He'd packed enough clothes for a week.

"I haven't been to my home since," he says in a soft brogue. His application, which had been approved earlier, was rejected this time.

Black's Denver life without him looks something like this: His sprawling ranch house in the Hilltop neighborhood has a for-sale sign in front of it. Inside the garage are two cars in need of maintenance. Harry, his 2-year-old Lab, lives with Joe, a man with a different sense of order than Harry is used to.

By rights, Black has none. After all, he's a foreign national. And though he and his partner of six years have a committed relationship and a business together, they don't live together. Now, each is trying to figure out how living together in the U.K. would work.

Black's often pragmatic if exhausted tone cracks when he talks about the strain on his and Joe's relationship.

Gordon Stewart stands beside a knee-high pile of refuse from the gutted flat he is redesigning from the ground up. Buying the house and remaking it into a home has been an exercise in satisfaction.

After 4 1/2 years of fighting, then lobbying, then accepting that he wouldn't be returning to the U.S. with his mate anytime soon, the pharmaceutical executive bought this new home.

At the same time, though, Stewart's new flat is the brick-and-mortar embodiment of a defeat. A U.S. citizen, the 47-year-old Pfizer marketing exec had planned to live and work in New York until he retired. His parents are deceased, and his sisters and brother, nieces and nephews live in the U.S., as do most of his life-long friends.

Living there is unlikely to happen as long as he remains with his Brazilian partner of eight years, Marcos, who is not allowed to enter the U.S.

But being able to live together in London, where Marcos has the right to work and health-care benefits, also suggests how corporations have been increasingly mindful about the domestic partnerships of gay employees — creating opportunities for them when government regulations create havoc.

When Marcos called Stewart from São Paulo to tell him his routine student-visa renewal turned out to be anything but, Stewart had worked for Pfizer for more than seven years.

The two lived in Brooklyn. And Marcos was enrolled at St. Francis College, a full-time student studying English and pre-law. His plan was to apply to a U.S. law school.

Marcos' student visa wasn't renewed, they were told, because the consulate didn't think he was in the U.S. as a legitimate student. He wasn't married, he was nearing 40, and Stewart, his financial sponsor, wasn't married and was over 40.

London. Glasgow. Vancouver. Fine places to set up house. Canada and the U.K. are even welcoming of same-sex couples. But, say the couples in this article, they are not home.

"How much more clearly could you be told you are a second-class citizen than you're going to have to give up that citizenship in order to have a life that is as full as a similarly situated straight person?" says Rachel B. Tiven, executive director of the New York-based advocacy group Immigration Equality. She sees it as a civil-rights issue: "Being forced to leave your country because you're gay is the worst kind of discrimination."

Full article: The Denver Post - Together, but nations apart