New Report On Progress In LGBTQ Immigration

A new report from Funders for LGBTQ Issues, titled Pathways Forward, has been released.
From the introduction:

For most of the twentieth century, anyone who openly identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) was banned from immigrating to the United States. HIV-positive people were also barred from entry. Until 2013, the immigration system denied recognition of LGBT families: the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) prevented gay, lesbian, and bisexual U.S. citizens from sponsoring their same-sex partners for permanent residence. 

Slowly, over the past three decades, all of that has changed. The ban on LGBT people was repealed in 1990, and the ban on people living with HIV was lifted in 2008. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Windsor decision overturned part of DOMA, recognizing the legitimacy of binational same-sex couples, ending years of separation and uncertainty for tens of thousands of couples.  

But the pathways to equality and basic quality of life is still hard for the vast majority of LGBT immigrants in the U.S., who now number an estimated 904,000. By comparison, New York State is home to 575,000 "out" LGBT adults. In fact, nearly a tenth of the nearly 9 million "out" LGBT adults are immigrants.

The full report is 24-pages long but is chock-full of important information like:

Funding for LGBTQ immigration issues has risen 20-fold from $146,000 in 2002 to over four million dollars in 2012.

As a former board member of Immigration Equality and an immigrant myself, this is good news!