Essay On Border Crossers

In Border Crossers: Seeking Asylum and Maneuvering Identities (Cantú, 2009) and ‘‘Gay? Prove it’’: The Politics of Queer Anti-Deportation Activism (Lewis, 2014) attention was directed to the dehumanizing process that some gay and lesbian immigrants encounter when they seek asylum from developed nations like the United Kingdom and the United States. How this process is made incredibly difficult if not impossible to achieve because immigration laws and policy are still working within a heteronormative framework that shows itself through “normative constructions of race/ethnicity, gender, and class (Cantú, 57). As Cantú explains, gay and lesbian asylum seekers must convince immigration authorities first and foremost that they are in fact gay or lesbian, but also that there is a well-founded fear of returning to their country of origin because they would be targets of persecution due to their sexual orientation (55). In this paper, I am going to argue that immigration authorities might be pushing some gay or lesbian immigrants to enter developed countries like the US without inspection. Some scholars have highlighted the fact that most immigrants enter the United States by crossing the border and the rest through legal means like a

However, as Lewis explains that this sort of evidence has unintendingly placed gay and lesbian asylum seekers in a situation were in the absence of video evidence their sexual preference claims are deemed incredulous; but even when video evidence is provided it is often dismiss as “bogus” but nevertheless sets expectancies on immigration officials for future claims of asylum seekers to provide video evidence (963). Further, there remains ambivalence in the type of evidence gay or lesbian asylum seekers need to present to the “decision-makers” to gain asylum (Lewis,