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California Democratic representative Maxine Waters, a member of the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on immigration, has cosponsored legislation that would provide immigration rights to binational gay couples and their families.

Waters’s support comes at a crucial time for LGBT immigration reform. Last week 60 Congress members issued a letter to President Barack Obama and congressional leaders urging passage of the legislation, originally introduced in the House by New York representative Jerrold Nadler and in the Senate by Vermont’s Patrick Leahy.
President Barack Obama is playing a perilous political game with some of his core constituencies, pursuing policies that threaten to diminish the enthusiasm of groups that helped put him into office.

In his first nine months, Obama has followed an agenda that raised concerns among unions, Jews, gays and Latinos — groups that backed him overwhelmingly and without which he cannot be re-elected. The complaints for now are mostly muted, and any damage done can be reversed. But all have high expectations for the president, and a few — particularly labor leaders and gays — view his presidency as the first, and perhaps the last chance for some time, to achieve long-coveted goals....
Who is really pointing the dagger to the heart of immigration reform, the senator who seeks to include permanent partners (including gays) or the Bishops and evangelicals who oppose it? As Julia Preston reported in the New York Times a week ago, the powerful chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, has set off a huge and mainly behind-the-scenes panic among certain religious supporters of so-called comprehensive immigration reform. Bishop John Wester, who heads the Catholic bishops’ Committee on Migration, wrote to the Congressional committee chairs who are beginning to work on immigration that Leahy’s Uniting American Families Act (UAFA) would “erode the institution of marriage and family.”

And just how “comprehensive” will immigration reform be if it fails to address the special horror of loving, stable bi-national couples being torn apart becaus
Rep. Michael Honda said, “The Reuniting Families Act should be at the heart of comprehensive immigration reform. Our system has not been updated in 20 years, separating spouses, children, siblings and their parents, who have played by the rules, for years, often decades. Our legislation is in line with both American family values and with our short-term need to grow our economy and save taxpayer money. With this bill, we are providing legal mechanisms to streamline the current immigration logjam, preventing waste of precious government resources and rewarding those who play by the rules. We are providing the American economy with new funds, in terms of remittances, which will now remain in the US with reunited families instead of being sent home, that’s an extra $46 billion from Latin American in one year alone. And we are comprehensive – making sure that all families, including same-

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Promoting public awareness of the need for fairness in immigration policy particularly as it relates to the rights of same-sex bi-national couples in the United States who seek equal immigration rights; Providing information regarding political issues relating to gay immigration equality issues, rights and policy.