US Immigrants by Region as of 2022

I feel like we never talk about how hard it is to be a trans immigrant. We never talk about how escaping from a country that persecutes you does not free you from suffering & bigotry.

I may not be able to attend my own graduation ceremony. I worked so hard these past three years to achieve something, to be the first person in my immediate family to finish uni, get a degree, & then be able to actually do something with it, to pick my own life course & not stray from it. I reinvented myself during these last three years so much, from the shy, dysphoric kid with no friends to a man who maybe isn't doing the best in life, but who has a hope for the future. I worked hard to present myself in the best way I could, & yet I won't be able to see the fruits of my labours.

And, sure, the reason is real silly. I can't legally change my name, so the name on the degree will be my dead one, & the Vice Chancellor will read out the corpse of my old self in front of all my teachers & peers, everyone who knew me as Booker, & Booker alone. And they will expect to see a young lady in a dress climb the stage, only to be met with a boy who isn't quite a man yet, who is still forced to live under a girl's name.

And why? Why! Because I am an immigrant who feared for my young life when Brexit was happening, who has been teased & bullied for being an ESL student, who never quite belonged. Because I am an immigrant transman who could be imprisoned in my country of birth for the crime of wanting to reinvent myself, who has to walk on eggshells around the man who reared me because he grew up Polish & catholic & who knows how he would react if I told him I was his grandson & not his granddaughter. I am an immigrant who has to hide behind their parents because who knows how my extended family will react to me, who is still not allowed to tell his cousin, his little sister whom he adores, his real name despite the fact I was her age when I started questioning my own gender & I somehow wasn't too young to be in pain!

I am an immigrant who cannot safely return home, but the country that took me in isn't quite the safe haven either. Because I need a passport to prove that my name has changed, but a passport cannot be issued to me under a name my birth country does not approve of. Because to change myself fully, I need to become a citizen to a country that abandoned my homeland after the war & looked away when it was being subjugated during it. Because I need to know how many of the swans in London belong to the Crown for the state to consider me a citizen of this dying empire, despite the fact I've lived here for so long, I can't remember what my childhood home back in Poland even looked like! I cannot truly remember what my room in that flat in a small, backwater Polish town looked like anymore, except for the bed that we now have in our guest bedroom, & the bookshelf that cradles all of my books on transness & queerness & feminism.

Because I am an immigrant from a country who hates me, I am forced to live in a country that hardly tolerates me, & to live as my true self I have to subjugate myself for the sake of an old empire that lost its touch. I have to submit myself to a personal sort of colonisation, to be able to walk onto that stage at graduation with my real name on the degree. But I can't do that, because I don't have the money, because I spent the last three years breaking my back proving to people that the little girl with behavioural problems who was always bullied, was able to become something greater than the sum of her parts. Because I now don't have the time or the patience to tell you exactly when the Union Jack was created, or at what hour of the day is tea time, & I don't have the time to wait for a passport to be sent to me, only for me to return it to sender with a plea of changing my name upon it.

Because my transmacs friends in college had their names changed at sixteen, while I'm already done with my undergrad & still have to contend with the question of what citizenship I would rather have. Because I will sooner be on hormones & growing a beard than I will be able to change my name.

And in all this I find it so ironic that I was named after an angel, & like everything else in my life, I reject the goodness & the easy way out, I reject the things that once made me, me, to become my own god & rebuild myself out of the scraps left behind by a life of turmoil.

And still I am just some immigrant bitch stealing jobs from good, hardworking Britons, & I'm still just a transsexual fag taking women's rights away, & I'm still just some freak of nature manipulating the kids into sin & immorality. And no matter where I go, where I turn to, I don't feel all that angelic at all.

Twelve Malawians have been deported from Israel after leaving the farms where they were working, to get higher salaries elsewhere. The 12 Malawians were among more than 40 foreign workers who were arrested while working at a bakery in Tel Aviv last week. The workers, who were part of a labour agreement between Israel and Malawi, were unhappy with working conditions in the agricultural sector and found work in a bakery instead. Israel's ambassador to Malawi Michael Lotem told the BBC: "Anybody who violates his visa terms will be deported – as easy as this, as in any country. "I hope it will be a sign for others that it is better to stick to the job. Nobody forced them to come, they came to do a job, they should do the job that is all." Last week, Benzani, a Malawian working in Israel, told the BBC that some of his compatriots working on other farms were being paid less than the minimum wage in Israel.

"The minimum wage in Israel is 32 shekels ($8.60; £6.85) an hour, but some of us are being paid 18 to 20 shekels an hour." Benzani said many of them had signed contracts which said they would receive $1,500 a month. Benzani is not one of those who were deported. Mr Lotem said that rather than leaving the farms and breaking the conditions of their visas, they should have lodged a complaint. “If someone thinks that he is not getting what he deserves, there is a hotline and a phone number they can call "Violating the law is not the answer. "The Israeli police shows zero tolerance to illegal activity especially these days when we have so many other troubles,” Mr Lotem said. Those deported were part of a labour drive by the Israeli government last year to fill a shortage of agricultural workers following October's deadly attacks on Israel by Hamas. This led Israel to stop giving permits to Palestinians to work on its farms, while 10,000 migrant farm workers - mostly Thai nationals - left Israel after war broke out. More than 200 Malawians went to Israel, while Kenya agreed to send 1,500 workers. The announcement of the deal sparked mixed reactions in Kenya, with some concerned about their safety. The two governments said it would help reduce unemployment in their countries. Mr Lotem also said that a new agreement had been signed for another 3,000 Malawians to go and work in Israel.

Imagine deporting someone because they wanted a job that actually paid the minimum wage

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"UNBELIEVABLE"!

Share if you do not agree with this sh!t.

Superman runs to Smallville in Gene Luen Yang’s “Superman Smashes the Klan”

He passes by the Lutheran church that has a verse on the sign

The verse Leviticus 19:34

What does that say?

“You must regard the foreigner who lives with you as the native-born among you. You are to love him as yourself, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt; I am Yahweh your God.”

‭‭Leviticus‬ ‭19‬:‭34‬ ‭HCSB‬‬

Nice work there

Remember Superman is the tale of the immigrant and the child raised between two worlds. How is that impossible a tale to tell?

Hard-working humble men make America great.

"While tourists visiting Mexican beaches complain about piles of smelly seaweed, one Mexican gardener reckoned it was something like a gift.

The governments in places like Cancun have been required to clear away as much as 40,000 tons of sargassum seaweed, which smells like rotten eggs, but Omar de Jesús Vazquez Sánchez is steering it away from the landfills and into a kiln, where he makes adobe-like blocks that pass regulation as a building material.

He started SargaBlock to market the bricks, which are being highlighted by the UN Development Program as a stroke of brilliance, and a sustainable solution to a current environmental problem.

His story begins back in 2015 when, like any experienced laborer, he found rich people were stuck with a job they didn’t want to do. In this case, it was cleaning up the sargassum on the beaches of the Riviera Maya.

Omar grew up in poverty, immigrated to the US as a child to become a day laborer, and eventually dropped out of school and became a substance abuser. The American dream never appealed to him as much as a “Mexican dream”—a mix of memories from his childhood and dreams of being a gardener back home, so he moved back.

His time feeling unwanted as an addict and immigrant gave him a unique perspective on the smelly seaweed.

“When you have problems with drugs or alcohol, you’re viewed as a problem for society. No one wants anything to do with you. They look away,” Omar told Christian Science Monitor in a translated interview.

“When sargassum started arriving, it created a similar reaction. Everyone was complaining, I wanted to mold something good out of something everyone saw as bad.”

The ecology and environment offices of Quintana Roo, the legislative area that includes the city of Cancun, approved the SargaBlocks for use, and similar organic-based blocks have been reckoned as being capable of enduring 120 years.

The UN Development Program selected Omar’s work to be featured in their Accelerator Lab global broadcast to alert the world of its value and ingenuity.

There are all kinds of naturally-occurring pollutants or burdens that could be used in construction, and the UNDP hoped that by sharing Omar’s vision of the future of the Caribbean’s sargassum problem, it would inspire others to act in similar ways.

Bricks and cement can be great sources to use up naturally-occurring material that’s dangerous or burdensome—like this Filippino community using the ash from volcanic eruptions to make bricks.

Omar has been fortunate enough to be able to donate 14 “Casas Angelitas,” or homes made of SargaBlock, to families in need, and seems to be exceedingly close to achieving his “Mexican dream.”"

-via Good News Network, 4/24/23

THIS

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Gov. Abbott installed circular saws in the Rio Grande. Migrants have already been caught and died in these “river walls.” This is clearly meant to hurt and kill more. Blatant human rights violation if that wasn’t immediately clear

Most foreign nationals in each Japanese prefecture.