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In the name of “Making America Great Again”, president Donald Trump’s second administration has so far kept one of his core campaign promises: carrying out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. This includes going after the US-born children of illegal immigrants, a policy that would not only tear families apart but is also plainly unconstitutional. He has also promised to stop and interrogate people who “look foreign” during detention sweeps. In the first 50 days of the new administration, the US Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) has already made as many arrests as it had in the full year of 2024. More troubling are the administration's plans to restrict legal migration. Such actions would not only close off an avenue of freedom for tens of thousands of LGBT immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers — it’s a rejection of the liberal values on which the US was created, and its ability to spread them.

When I was a teenager, I dreamed of living in the USA, but I wasn’t your typical Eastern European adolescent. I wasn’t obsessed with Hollywood, McDonald's, or the mass culture that most millennials I knew fantasised about. I may have been born in Ukraine and spent months in Russia every year, but I’d never truly absorbed or understood the dominant post-Soviet culture.

Growing up as a bookish autistic kid, I learned how to communicate with Russians not from the culture, but by reading works like Henry Kissinger’s and Zbigniew Brzezinski’s books about diplomacy or the autobiography of Madeleine Albright. These politicians were among the most influential figures of their eras, their names known around the world. They were as American as apple pie — despite the fact that none of them were born in the US. Kissinger's family moved to the US from Nazi Germany as Jewish refugees in 1938. Albright’s family fled from the pro-Soviet dictatorship in Czechoslovakia. And the Brzezinski family used diplomatic connections to escape Poland ahead of the Nazi and Soviet invasions.

It’s become a cliché, but it’s true: America is a nation of immigrants — a country created by, shaped by, and reflective of people born all around the planet. A liberal immigration system has been baked into the country from its inception. And while the US, like every nation, has its own checkered past with bigotry and intolerance, Americanism has never been based on birthplace. That’s not some “new”, “trendy”, or “woke” idea, as Trump supporters prefer to imagine — it’s deeply rooted in American culture. As a teenager, one of my favorite quotes was from a speech Ronald Reagan gave in 1989:

“You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.''

My admiration for the Republican Party ended a long time ago, as well as my dreams of moving to America. I am happy to live as a refugee in the UK now — much happier than I ever was in the post-Soviet world. But I never lost my hope in the promise of America. As a transgender person with a bi wife, I knew that because of America’s core liberal values of liberty, opportunity, and freedom, we could live a better, fuller life in the US than in the post-Soviet world. And I’m not alone in that belief — after more than six years of work with LGBT refugees around the globe, I have seen in them that same hope.

Every year, thousands of LGBT people seek out the US for political asylum, asking for refugee status because they were persecuted for their sexual orientation or gender identity. Thousands more who will never be captured in statistics immigrate to the US from countries where it is unsafe to be queer as refugees from war, as students, or on work visas, and who only come out of the closet once they’re safe and free on American soil. After all, 64 countries still criminalise same-sex relationships, so it’s no wonder that many LGBT people from those nations are in the closet.

Notably, LGBT refugees are often extremely open to their adopted countries and tend to be eager to assimilate. As a refugee myself, I understand this only too well. I’ve always been bullied for who I am, and only after I moved to the West did I feel safe to fully be myself. Of course, there are some LGBT refugees who love their homelands, but in my experience corresponding with and interviewing LGBT refugees who moved to the US, most prefer to be assimilated in their new home rather than maintain strong links with their old one. Unlike many cis-hetero refugees I know, who are more prone to associate with people from their own religious and ethnic backgrounds, many LGBT refugees have far weaker ties with diaspora communities and sometimes even avoid mentioning their birthplace. It’s an uncomfortable truth left-wing activists ignore for fear of looking racist, but many refugees habour little love for the countries, cultures, and religions they have fled from. If you were persecuted by the government, norms, and people of your homeland, you might feel the same way.

This disconnect has made for some awkward social interactions in the years since I arrived in the West. Whenever some well-meaning, progressive-minded person tries to make me feel at ease by disparaging their own Western country and saying something nice about the post-Soviet bloc, especially Russia, I feel trapped. I vehemently disagree with their characterisation, but I also don’t want to respond to their clumsy attempts at kindness by arguing. When I see Westerners putting down the West, my reflex is to defend it — because I have lived in the alternative and don’t take it for granted.

Another reason LGBT immigrants can integrate so well into American society is not only how easy it is to find a local LGBT community to join, but also the fact that the American LGBT movement is known globally. In my experience, most LGBT refugees know more about American LGBT history than the LGBT history of their birth country. As the world’s cultural superpower, the US broadcasts itself everywhere. As a result, many LGBT folks around the world, people who, in many cases, have never even visited America, feel a closer kinship with the US than with their own country of origin.

At the same time, LGBT refugees are often the most invisible. As a 2022 study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found, LGBT refugees face additional challenges and discrimination when going through the immigration system, regardless of which political party is in control. Other research has shown that South and Central American LGBT migrants are more likely to be kidnapped and abused at the US border compared to cis-hetero people. The Williams Institute study also found that LGBT refugees have higher rates of mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, and PTSD, which are caused predominantly by discrimination in their home countries.

Unfreedom, it turns out, is bad for mental health, and almost every refugee I’ve ever spoken to has reported being in a far better state of mind once resettled in a country with robust human rights and cultural tolerance. Such people are not only happier and healthier, they are more motivated to contribute to American society and to be outspoken patriots. In fact, a 2019 Cato Institute study found that immigrants are six percentage points likelier to say they are “proud of being American” compared to native-born people, 30 points less likely to be ashamed of the US, and 10 points likelier to say the world would be better if more countries were like America. Immigrants also express higher institutional trust in Congress, the presidency, and the US Supreme Court by about a 10-point margin each.

This pattern is especially true for people fleeing fundamentalist religious backgrounds, whether it’s Saudi Salafism, pro-Ayatollah Iranian Shia Islam, or conservative Catholicism in Mexico. This is why policies such as the 2017 Muslim travel ban are so dangerous — blocking the immigration of people who face prosecution, violence, or even death in their home countries.

As is often the case in politics, this issue is much bigger than any one group — in this case, LGBT immigrants to the US. It’s perhaps even bigger than refugee rights or LGBT rights as a whole. It’s about what it means to be American. Is America an ideal, like the Founders wrote about? Is it an aspiration, like President Reagan said? Or is it merely blood and soil?

During a campaign event in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Donald Trump openly said of immigrants who are suspected of crimes, “They’re not humans, they’re animals.”

The irony in all of this, of course, is that the dynamism and prosperity of immigration and cultural exchange is a large part of what “made America great” in the first place. And LGBT immigrants, in particular, are a group of untapped human potential. Barring their entrance doesn’t just hurt them, it hurts yourself.

Published Mar 26, 2025