Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of Citizenship

3. Family, Unvalued: Sex and Security: A Short History of Exclusions

55 chapter 3 Family, Unvalued Sex and Security: A Short History of Exclusions Scott Long, Jessica Stern, and Adam Francouer Richard Adams, a U.S. citizen, was in love with Anthony Sullivan, an Australian national. They lived together in Colorado in 1975. With Anthony’s visa about to expire, Adams tried to sponsor him for permanent residency in the United States. The written answer of the Immigration and Naturalization Service made its position clear: Your visa petition . . . for classification of Anthony Corbett Sullivan as the spouse of a United States citizen [is] denied for the following reasons : You have failed to establish that a bona fide marital relationship can exist between two faggots.1 Three decades later, what has changed? “Faggot” relationships remain invalid within the system. And even the word resurfaces. One man wrote us: This chapter is an excerpt from Family, Unvalued: Discrimination, Denial and the Fate of Binational Same-Sex Couples under U.S. Law (New York: Human Rights Watch and Immigration Equality, 2006). Reprinted with permission. 56 Scott Long, Jessica Stern, and Adam Francouer While traveling abroad I met the person I would spend the rest of my life with, and eventually start a family with. Bogdan is a citizen of . . . the former Yugoslavia. Because of both of our countries’ treatment [of] its own gay citizens, it’s been impossible to be together at some points. Most of the time I’ve had to go to Serbia, because after Bogdan tried obtaining a visa at the American Embassy in Belgrade, he was denied, because “they don’t give visas to fag couples,” as we were told by the visa officer. . . . I, being an American, had the preconception that my country was the true land of the free. I guess I was wrong.2 Immigration, Gender, and Sexuality in U.S. History Lesbian or gay noncitizens trying to join their U.S. partners, and transgender people trying to see their relationships acknowledged, are caught between two forces: escalating panic about “porous” borders, and intensifying battles over the legal status of partnerships between people of the same sex. These pincers convey an unmistakable message: You do not belong. Yet neither ferocious anti-immigrant feeling nor fear of sexuality and sexual “deviance” is new in U.S. politics or society. Nor is it novel for them to meet. Fantasies about immigrants’ sexualities figured heavily in nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century anti-immigrant prejudice—from pornographic imprecations against Irish convents as scenes for orgies3 to a lurid literature on “white slavery.”4 At the end of the nineteenth century, these bogeymen took on both legal and scientific garb. The 1875 Page Act was the first major federal measure restricting entry; prostitutes were a key category of “undesirables” it excluded, and sensational stories about sex workers from China led to further bans on Chinese immigration.5 Meanwhile, Francis Walker, an influential statistician and superintendent of two successive U.S. censuses, warned of “immigrants from southern Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Russia” who “are beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence.”6 Such racist notions played on a distorted Darwinism. Immigrants became a biological threat, defined by their prolific sexuality and perverse vigor. The emerging pseudoscience of eugenics—the belief that societies should keep Family, Unvalued 57 the “unfit” from breeding—bolstered anti-immigrant sentiment.7 Not only the crude rural racists of the Ku Klux Klan but also urban intellectuals and self-styled progressives argued that immigration and immigrants’ reproduction had to stop.8 Groups opposing immigration spread and spawned: a “Race Betterment Foundation,” the “Committee on Selective Immigration,” a “National Committee for Mental Hygiene.”9 The word “hygiene” is suggestive. Immigrants were a racial peril but also a menace to healthy masculinity, enervating men of the “native stock.” As one congressman said in 1896, immigration restriction was needed “to preserve the human blood and manhood of the American character by the exclusion of depraved human beings.”10 The proximity of immigrants, with their exuberant, excessive sexuality, jumbled gender relations—producing an “impotent, decadent manhood.”11 A sweeping “red scare” took place in 1919–1920, when a federal attorney general and an ambitious aide named J. Edgar Hoover warned that anarchist immigrants intended revolution—and deported hundreds. Existing fears thus drew new power from the specter of terrorism. From 1917, a new wave of laws restricted immigrant intake. They culminated in the...