Discussion
I’ve been thinking a lot about my recent geographic mobility.
For the last eight years, as an adult immigrant to the U.S. stuck to one job and one visa, I didn’t have it.
Before, I was extremely geographically mobile. I was based in Singapore and, like most tech professionals based in Singapore, I probably went to more than ten countries a year.
It took me eight years to get my old life back.
On this trip I’ve also met friends from certain sanctioned countries who have such a hard time finding stability and growth anywhere they go. Extremely talented people for whom their only crime is being born where they were. If international immigration was hard before, it’s become hard and cruel in lots and lots of places including those you don’t hear about.
I have some guilt over how ‘easy’ it was for me. It was still difficult and challenging and expensive, but with my excellent passport and good jobs I rarely faced challenges beyond the logistics and costs.
There are many people for whom all of that can be true (getting everything right, being able to afford it, etc) and
Luck, legislation, still fucks them over.
Like the citizens of the 39 and later 75 countries for whom the US govt has simply stopped processing many immigration benefits. Like the spouses of many U.S. citizens abroad who are facing multi-year delays for no reason other than administrative malice.
And the immigrants to many other countries who have been getting rugs pulled out from under them, to pander to their increasingly xenophobic local populations.
I have some friends in San Francisco with refugee papers who are so thankful that they got to get out of the wars they were in. Things are getting harder, not easier. If the U.S. doesn’t work out for them they don’t have anywhere else to go, really.
(And the administration is pulling a lot of legal moves to make life much much harder for refugees and asylum folks)
The degree of cruelty imposed by just about anyone working on any immigration policy anywhere today is horrific. Not surprising, because immigrants are always the first to be treated like shit, but horrific. I think we are led by cruel people all around.
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