Citizens for Immigrants

The dark cloud

Submitted by a reader:

I am a lucky person.  I’m married to one of the most wonderful men in the world.  He is kind, thoughtful, hardworking, funny, loving, well-balanced, intelligent, and good at so many things.  Together we have turned a small dumpy house into a charming home.  Passers-by tell us how much they love what we’ve done to the house.  Visitors can feel the love that fills our home.  Every day we are happy together and grateful for what we have.  But any day we could lose it all.  I am a US citizen and he is not.  The lawyers we have seen have told us that we cannot change his immigration status.  It is horrible that we have to live with this dark cloud hanging over our happy lives.  As a citizen, don’t I have the right to marry who I please?  It’s not just me.  At work I help families thrown into chaos by a sudden deportation of a family member.  I help these once self-reliant families get onto welfare.  They don’t want to but they have no choice.  How has deporting hard-working, tax-paying, family-supporting people helped us?  How has it made us safer?  How has it strengthened our economy?  I think that we can do better than this, that we have in the past, and that we must in the future.  For now, we just live with this dark cloud and hope it will pass before it strikes us and ruins our lives forever.