What in the world does web3 community building have to do with immigrant and refugee integration? Well–let me tell you! 

Working with international newcomers (a more neutral term for foreign-born residents), usually shortened to just ‘newcomers’, means helping with all.the.things-big and small-about living in a new place with a different language and culture. 

It means helping with public benefits, school enrollment, calls home from school to a family who doesn’t speak English; it means explaining what truancy is, and its consequences. It means setting up bank accounts, and helping people find jobs. And that’s if the family has status and rights to certain benefits. 

If you’re blessed enough to work with undocumented residents, the hurdles are so.much.bigger. You can’t apply for a bank account. You can only look for certain kinds of work in a discreet way. 

No matter who holds elected office, as long as people think they have even an iota of a chance at a better life, they will figure out a way to come. We may live in a globally connected world with information streaming between people thousands of miles apart, but not all information finds its target audience–and not all information is created equally. 

In the case of the US, the Border Patrol, the Department of Homeland Security, and a myriad of other offices are trying their best to turn people away at the border, or lock them up upon arrival. This reality, or that of not being able to find safe work, just doesn’t percolate down to small villages in the mountains of Guatemala. What form of it does make it there is taken in the context of poverty, desperation, and the stories of the few who have found a way to a better life (or the photos and messages they craft to portray one).

We cannot rely on kids being separated from their parents as a deterrent, because the economic and social realities in other places–those push factors–are stronger than the gut wrenching pain we’ve put so many through. Plus, the human spirit is resilient–and who knows, maybe I’ll get lucky. 

I wouldn’t live in the US if four separate families hadn’t chosen to leave different parts of Europe to come here fleeing abject poverty. Who am I to say someone shouldn’t flee poverty in the hopes of realizing some amount of potential? Who is anyone? Well, there are lots of people who think they have that right; in fact, they are elected to enforce that right through border policy and immigration controls. 

I won’t run for office, but I will help build a decentralized internet that gives people more autonomy and self determination than they presently have in many places. That’s why I’ve switched from applying for federal grants for work programs to upskill immigrants, or help increase the English literacy rate of women. Those programs are not bad, but web3 could make them more efficient. Web3 jobs aren’t part of those landscapes yet, and that should change. 

Web3 technologies can open the structures of financial and economic participation to millions of people around the world who have been systematically excluded due to late-stage capitalism. Economies are slow to adapt, but we’re seeing huge changes in places like the Philippines and Nigeria regarding web3 adoption by regular people. 

Even “normal” Americans are starting to take note; my mother-in-law, who skeptically watches our work in web3, sent us the New York Times article (18 Mar. 2024) titled “What Meltdown? Crypto Comes Roaring Back in the Philippines.” This is the first non-scandal article she has sent me on crypto in months. 

In fact, during the most recent bear market (safe to say we’re on the tail end now… I think), the only place in the world where crypto adoption was on the rise, according to Chainanalysis’ 2023 Geography of Crypto Currency Report, were LMI countries like India, Nigeria, and Ukraine. 

Why? Because education and infrastructure rates are high enough to know about different types of opportunities, but wages are low enough that people can’t make a good living. For those with the means to learn and work, they stay. For those without-they leave. For those with significant means to learn and work, many of them leave also. Nigeria and Ukraine both have significant emigration flows to the United States and have for over 50 years. 

Many US State Department dollars go to support local and national economies all over the world to stem outflows of uneducated labor and highly educated brain drain. Giving people the ability to create their own economies would do the same. 

I was at a dinner party with two non-profit leaders, one from Ukraine, and one from Angola who were visiting the US through a State Department-funded program this past weekend. We, of course, talked web3–much to the chagrin of the host who is a COBOL programmer for a legacy bank. 

Angola is a country ripe for a tech leap forward similar to that of Nigeria–but they lack the physical infrastructure and educational standards, especially outside of the big cities. However, their civil society is strong and growing. They are fighting for a more democratic system that empowers its citizens.

The nonprofit leader I supped with leads an environmental sustainability group that helps create economic opportunities based on environmental sustainability practices; one project involved reporting on water quality. There are literally DeSci and ReFi projects out there pioneering economic models around this! 

With programs like EthicHub, who have paved the way with excellent tokenomics, based on circles of trust to ensure loan repayments, models exist to be adopted by other groups looking to find hyper-local ways of growing sustainable economies. 

Crypto people love their “next billion” slogan, but Forbes estimates around 300 million people own some kind of crypto digital asset at the moment. So… how do we even hit the first billion when most dApps aren’t mobile-optimized, or for that matter, even usable on mobile? 

40% of the world’s population live in Low to Medium Income (LMI) countries — more than any other income category. These are counties where people rely on mobile internet because, as my Nigerian coworker noted last week, “a cable in the ocean was cut, and so there’s almost no internet”, IN LAGOS. “Sorry boss, that community call is going to start late because I have to go to my rich friend’s house who has a hardline.” 

Yes, that’s the day-to-day reality of many daily web3 users. Imagine: what could they do with better infrastructure? 

Maybe my husband could have hired the technical writer he wanted (a Nigerian woman who was loads more talented than the two other people he hired, neither of whom worked out long term), but his large web3 company doesn’t have an HR subsidiary in western Africa –despite Nigeria having the second most web3 users on the planet. 

So: DePIN, that’s part of the solution. If we want to decentralize hosting the internet, we also have to be able to… get internet. 

Making sure people can access the decentralized internet is as important as creating the software. Combinations of LoRaWAN, decentralized services like ISP in a box and companies like Althea and Magic.co, with the accessibility of refurbished computers could go such a long way in connecting people in low-internet access areas.

And that’s not just in rural areas; I see it here in Cleveland, Ohio, where half the urban city population don’t have access to broadband internet because of canopy cover and poverty. There’s also the question of closing this digital gap in the Appalachian region, due to the mountains and lack of infrastructure investment. 

The last remaining piece: education. You had to know it was coming.

I, too, was a crypto skeptic–when all I knew about was DeFi. However, after being in SheFi Cohort 7, and obsessively grilling my husband for a year straight (literally), it’s hard to have a conversation where I don’t draw some connection to web3. It’s like immigration--it can and does touch every aspect of life. 

Growing up a millennial, I remember when the internet became normal; I remember no longer writing down by hand spoken directions on how to get somewhere. I know we can learn the tech. But how we do it is not a one-and-done; it’s a “yes, and” situation:

• Just like we had typing class in school, and basic coding in some schools now, we must incorporate web3 tech into the stack we’re teaching. 

• We need yayas to accept crypto at unlicensed home kitchens (me and Dan had the same idea, apparently)

• We need to teach those yayas how to use a wallet 

• That wallet needs good UX, on mobile 

• And it needs impeccable localization–or be natively built not in English. (All the tias in Buenos Aires now have a DID as part of their municipal ID, so that’s a win.)

• We have to teach moms in upskilling programs how to be financially independent with web3 tools, and teaching them how to use their skills in a web3 market. 

This list, obviously, is not exhaustive, but you get the idea: this has to be hands-on, In Real Life and on GitHub. Yes, and.

The next question–and perhaps the final question–is, will web3 and the DID movement really let us own our identities and sovereignties, or does the Department of Homeland Security beat all the crypto anarchists and whales to the punch? 

There are lots of civil servants using blockchains in all kinds of interesting ways….let’s make sure people who actually value privacy, autonomy, and collective governance are the ones pulling the levers. 

What in the world does web3 community building have to do with immigrant and refugee integration? Well–let me tell you! 

Working with international newcomers (a more neutral term for foreign-born residents), usually shortened to just ‘newcomers’, means helping with all.the.things-big and small-about living in a new place with a different language and culture. 

It means helping with public benefits, school enrollment, calls home from school to a family who doesn’t speak English; it means explaining what truancy is, and its consequences. It means setting up bank accounts, and helping people find jobs. And that’s if the family has status and rights to certain benefits. 

If you’re blessed enough to work with undocumented residents, the hurdles are so.much.bigger. You can’t apply for a bank account. You can only look for certain kinds of work in a discreet way. 

No matter who holds elected office, as long as people think they have even an iota of a chance at a better life, they will figure out a way to come. We may live in a globally connected world with information streaming between people thousands of miles apart, but not all information finds its target audience–and not all information is created equally. 

In the case of the US, the Border Patrol, the Department of Homeland Security, and a myriad of other offices are trying their best to turn people away at the border, or lock them up upon arrival. This reality, or that of not being able to find safe work, just doesn’t percolate down to small villages in the mountains of Guatemala. What form of it does make it there is taken in the context of poverty, desperation, and the stories of the few who have found a way to a better life (or the photos and messages they craft to portray one).

We cannot rely on kids being separated from their parents as a deterrent, because the economic and social realities in other places–those push factors–are stronger than the gut wrenching pain we’ve put so many through. Plus, the human spirit is resilient–and who knows, maybe I’ll get lucky. 

I wouldn’t live in the US if four separate families hadn’t chosen to leave different parts of Europe to come here fleeing abject poverty. Who am I to say someone shouldn’t flee poverty in the hopes of realizing some amount of potential? Who is anyone? Well, there are lots of people who think they have that right; in fact, they are elected to enforce that right through border policy and immigration controls. 

I won’t run for office, but I will help build a decentralized internet that gives people more autonomy and self determination than they presently have in many places. That’s why I’ve switched from applying for federal grants for work programs to upskill immigrants, or help increase the English literacy rate of women. Those programs are not bad, but web3 could make them more efficient. Web3 jobs aren’t part of those landscapes yet, and that should change. 

Web3 technologies can open the structures of financial and economic participation to millions of people around the world who have been systematically excluded due to late-stage capitalism. Economies are slow to adapt, but we’re seeing huge changes in places like the Philippines and Nigeria regarding web3 adoption by regular people. 

Even “normal” Americans are starting to take note; my mother-in-law, who skeptically watches our work in web3, sent us the New York Times article (18 Mar. 2024) titled “What Meltdown? Crypto Comes Roaring Back in the Philippines.” This is the first non-scandal article she has sent me on crypto in months. 

In fact, during the most recent bear market (safe to say we’re on the tail end now… I think), the only place in the world where crypto adoption was on the rise, according to Chainanalysis’ 2023 Geography of Crypto Currency Report, were LMI countries like India, Nigeria, and Ukraine. 

Why? Because education and infrastructure rates are high enough to know about different types of opportunities, but wages are low enough that people can’t make a good living. For those with the means to learn and work, they stay. For those without-they leave. For those with significant means to learn and work, many of them leave also. Nigeria and Ukraine both have significant emigration flows to the United States and have for over 50 years. 

Many US State Department dollars go to support local and national economies all over the world to stem outflows of uneducated labor and highly educated brain drain. Giving people the ability to create their own economies would do the same. 

I was at a dinner party with two non-profit leaders, one from Ukraine, and one from Angola who were visiting the US through a State Department-funded program this past weekend. We, of course, talked web3–much to the chagrin of the host who is a COBOL programmer for a legacy bank. 

Angola is a country ripe for a tech leap forward similar to that of Nigeria–but they lack the physical infrastructure and educational standards, especially outside of the big cities. However, their civil society is strong and growing. They are fighting for a more democratic system that empowers its citizens.

The nonprofit leader I supped with leads an environmental sustainability group that helps create economic opportunities based on environmental sustainability practices; one project involved reporting on water quality. There are literally DeSci and ReFi projects out there pioneering economic models around this! 

With programs like EthicHub, who have paved the way with excellent tokenomics, based on circles of trust to ensure loan repayments, models exist to be adopted by other groups looking to find hyper-local ways of growing sustainable economies. 

Crypto people love their “next billion” slogan, but Forbes estimates around 300 million people own some kind of crypto digital asset at the moment. So… how do we even hit the first billion when most dApps aren’t mobile-optimized, or for that matter, even usable on mobile? 

40% of the world’s population live in Low to Medium Income (LMI) countries — more than any other income category. These are counties where people rely on mobile internet because, as my Nigerian coworker noted last week, “a cable in the ocean was cut, and so there’s almost no internet”, IN LAGOS. “Sorry boss, that community call is going to start late because I have to go to my rich friend’s house who has a hardline.” 

Yes, that’s the day-to-day reality of many daily web3 users. Imagine: what could they do with better infrastructure? 

Maybe my husband could have hired the technical writer he wanted (a Nigerian woman who was loads more talented than the two other people he hired, neither of whom worked out long term), but his large web3 company doesn’t have an HR subsidiary in western Africa –despite Nigeria having the second most web3 users on the planet. 

So: DePIN, that’s part of the solution. If we want to decentralize hosting the internet, we also have to be able to… get internet. 

Making sure people can access the decentralized internet is as important as creating the software. Combinations of LoRaWAN, decentralized services like ISP in a box and companies like Althea and Magic.co, with the accessibility of refurbished computers could go such a long way in connecting people in low-internet access areas.

And that’s not just in rural areas; I see it here in Cleveland, Ohio, where half the urban city population don’t have access to broadband internet because of canopy cover and poverty. There’s also the question of closing this digital gap in the Appalachian region, due to the mountains and lack of infrastructure investment. 

The last remaining piece: education. You had to know it was coming.

I, too, was a crypto skeptic–when all I knew about was DeFi. However, after being in SheFi Cohort 7, and obsessively grilling my husband for a year straight (literally), it’s hard to have a conversation where I don’t draw some connection to web3. It’s like immigration--it can and does touch every aspect of life. 

Growing up a millennial, I remember when the internet became normal; I remember no longer writing down by hand spoken directions on how to get somewhere. I know we can learn the tech. But how we do it is not a one-and-done; it’s a “yes, and” situation:

• Just like we had typing class in school, and basic coding in some schools now, we must incorporate web3 tech into the stack we’re teaching. 

• We need yayas to accept crypto at unlicensed home kitchens (me and Dan had the same idea, apparently)

• We need to teach those yayas how to use a wallet 

• That wallet needs good UX, on mobile 

• And it needs impeccable localization–or be natively built not in English. (All the tias in Buenos Aires now have a DID as part of their municipal ID, so that’s a win.)

• We have to teach moms in upskilling programs how to be financially independent with web3 tools, and teaching them how to use their skills in a web3 market. 

This list, obviously, is not exhaustive, but you get the idea: this has to be hands-on, In Real Life and on GitHub. Yes, and.

The next question–and perhaps the final question–is, will web3 and the DID movement really let us own our identities and sovereignties, or does the Department of Homeland Security beat all the crypto anarchists and whales to the punch? 

There are lots of civil servants using blockchains in all kinds of interesting ways….let’s make sure people who actually value privacy, autonomy, and collective governance are the ones pulling the levers.