Moving on

I turns out that two people at my work, both with the same first name, are soon heading back to their respective homelands of Australia and New Zealand. The Kiwi one is a close friend of mine and I've known for most of this year that she would be leaving. I only found out today that the Aussie is also going back home. It was a much quicker decision for her, spurred on by being in Sydney recently for a business trip. She has a Dutch partner and she wasn't 100% sure he would come with her to Australia, but he is going with her, which is good. It's kind of funny because just a couple of weeks ago I was telling her about my plans to go to either Australia or New Zealand and about why I wanted to see what it was like to live there and talking about having Dutch partners and how we feel about living here and trying to figure out where home is. I can't help but be jealous of both of my co-workers, first of all for them to have a home they're happy to go back to, and that they've reached the time when things come together and allow them to do so.

At least they are going back because they want to. Some people don't get a choice, thanks to an incredibly cruel law in the US. I've read about this before, but heard about another example when I was reading Willamette Week yesterday:

Turns out that Vat [& Tonsure] owner Rose-Marie Barbeau Quinn, a Canadian national who's lived in Portland since 1976, faces a forced return to her native land. Quinn's immigration problems stem from her marriage to longtime Vat partner Mike Quinn, just before he died in 1991. Their union didn't last long enough for the feds, a problem she fended off with help from Oregon's congressional delegation. But unless lawmakers act again, she must return to Canada by the end of October.

Apparently if you have a green card in the US based on marriage to a US citizen, if your spouse dies and you've only been married a couple of years (I forget the exact length of time), you lose your right to remain in the US and must go back to your home country. Never mind any house you may own, any job you may hold -- or in the case of the woman in the WW story, the fact that she's lived in Portland longer than I've been alive -- not to mention dealing at the same time with the loss of your spouse, the US wants you out. I shouldn't be surprised really, since after a few years of experience with these types of immigration laws, it is obvious that the governments have no interest in kindness towards even their own citizens who happen to have foreign partners. I've been lucky so far, but if anything about our situation changes, it could always have consequences for our possibility to stay together as "easily" as we do now.