In pursuit of love: ‘Safe passages’, migration and queer South Asians in the US

Abstract

In the last decade or two the notion of human security has emerged as a benchmark for assessing the quality of everyday lives. Despite the paradigmatic shift, scholarly inquiries on human security rarely center sexual migrants. This article attends to this gap. Based on 30 in-depth interviews and supplemented with web material, the article describes the unique and multidimensional vulnerabilities endured by queer immigrants of color – queer South Asians – in the US. The article simultaneously contextualizes and moves beyond the areas of law and public policy, to examine queer migration and security from the subjective lens of the migrants (documented, undocumented, refugee and asylees) in order to demonstrate that safety, security and acceptance are negotiated with multiple agents (such as intimate partners, family, co-ethnic community, etc.) amid social cleavages (such as class, nationality, religion, gender and age) that facilitate or interrupt migration in ‘glocal’ contexts where the global and local intersect in complex ways to suffuse all such experiences.

Race, Gender, and Violence

“…In a different context, Adur (2018) explores how queer immigrants of color negotiate security and safety in the united States. She shows the transnational raced/classed/gendered/sexualized vulnerabilities experienced by documented and undocumented groups of queer, mostly South Asian, migrants.…”

“There is Absolutely No Discrimination Based on that Allowed”: Marriage, Migration, and Equality Rhetoric as a Justification for Harm

“…In 1909, the federal government funded a special report on an imagined influx of “prostitutes,” “pederasts,” and “sodomites.” The report concluded that such people should be deported and, if naturalized, have their citizenship revoked (Canaday 2009). The Immigration Act of 1917, building on the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, again expanded the classes of excludable migrants, barring people from Southwest, Southeast, and South Asia; people who could not pass a literacy test; and a new psychiatric-cum-legal category of “constitutional psychopathic inferiority” that included people whose (imputed) sexualities and genders differed from the Euroamerican norm (Adur 2018). Records from this period show that officials also excluded people whom they deemed to be “moral perverts” or “deviants” under the public charge provision, on the grounds that such people would be socially ostracized and thus unable to support themselves (Canaday 2009).…”

“…Kyaw-Soe continued from here to discuss other hurdles, such as Burmese people not having surnames and the hell this created on US immigration forms. He is certainly not alone in this; NOLO’s fiancé and marriage visa guide includes a whole section titled “what’s your name?” and describes name issues as “a bureaucratic morass” (Bray 2019:50–51). The combined ethnocentrism and ineptness of US bureaucracy make even the simplest processes into complicated problems.…”