Shamira Ibrahim has nostalgically recalled being far from home, after a grueling journey across the US-Canada border, struggles to obtain visas, poverty, a battle with the criminal justice system and giant financial obstacles as a result of being an immigrant from East Africa.
When Ibrahim was just 5 years old, he arrived in the United States with his family. He recalls living briefly in East Africa before moving to Canada. Now 30, he says he spent most of his life in the countryside, experiencing firsthand the fear of being a Black immigrant.
In a territory like the USA, whose empire is based on the criminalization of foreigners, African American immigrants have an additional stressful element surrounding this, since this society in this nation remains intrinsically criminalized.
Around 71% of immigrants in the USA are African American, and because of this they are already more likely to be deported than immigrants of other races, according to a report by the Black Alliance for Just Immigration.
Between June 2018 and June 2020, African American immigrants paid higher bail amounts than non-African Americans at detention centers, according to the Refugee and Immigrant Legal Services and Education Center. This has led to the recognition that migrants end up in immigration detention centers for extended periods, sometimes indefinitely, due to their inability to afford the disproportionately high bail amounts.
African American societies have been and are subject to arrests and prosecutions far more frequently than the general non-African population; 761% of African American immigrants are deported for having had contact or an argument with the police, according to the Black Alliance report.
Because of all these issues, UndocuBlack, the Black Immigrant Collective, African Communities Together, and other groups fought for years to get Congress to pass the Liberian Refugee Immigration Equality Act, a law that offers Liberians living in the U.S. since 2014 the opportunity to become permanent residents, obtain a green card, and ultimately, citizenship. Congress passed the law in 2019; UndocuBlack officials said it is the first legalization bill to become law in more than a decade.
This news story was created from NBCNEWS: https://nbcnews.to/2WNKqif