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Immigrating while queer: America has a complex history of exclusion

Release Date
2025-11-24
Media
The 19th News
Summary
The story centers on Tara Asgar, a queer and gender-nonconforming Bangladeshi who escaped the 2016 murder of LGBTQ magazine editor Xulhaz Mannan and fled to the United States. Although relocating likely saved her life, she arrived at a moment when the U.S. political climate—marked by rising anti-immigrant sentiment and growing backlash against transgender rights—offered only uneven safety. Asgar notes that protection in the U.S. varies widely depending on race, class, immigration status, and geography.

The article traces the long history of U.S. immigration policies that, for more than a century, excluded LGBTQ people. Beginning with the 1875 Page Law and continuing through the 1917 Immigration Act and the 1952 and 1965 immigration laws, the government barred people labeled as “sexual deviants.” Even after homosexuality was removed from the psychiatric disorder list in 1972, queer migrants continued to face exclusion. The 1980s saw the first shifts, with some asylum claims by LGBTQ applicants being tested during events like the Mariel boatlift.

A major turning point came with the Immigration Act of 1990, which officially repealed the ban on LGBTQ immigrants. Key court cases in the 1990s and early 2000s—such as those of Toboso-Alfonso, Pitcherskaia, and Hernandez-Montiel—gradually established that persecution based on sexual orientation or gender identity could justify asylum. Transgender immigrants faced additional barriers, with discriminatory policies lasting until 2007 and surgical requirements remaining until 2011.

Despite expanded legal protections, advocates warn that recent political and legal challenges in the U.S. threaten LGBTQ immigration rights. Trans asylum seekers now face difficulties as federal documents restrict recognition of nonbinary identities.

Asgar, still awaiting an asylum interview nearly a decade later, says being a trans migrant means constantly navigating borders—between genders, cultures, and systems of recognition—while having to continually prove the legitimacy of one’s struggle for safety.
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