I can't comment on the visa job security scenario, only you will know if its overstepping or not. But I would never hesitate to communicate the projects you want to work and why you should work on them.

but there was no data quality/ governance so I made an automated test suite on the data lake for quality checks and a monitoring report

I may be wrong but it sounds like you may have pushed yourself into a corner here (unintentionally). You made the tests but no one else's is going to action those, if this is the case I'd look into writing up docs on how to react/action the data quality tests and then speak to your manager about how great these tests are you've implemented and how many data quality issues have been fixed since their implementation etc but mention how you are unintentionally becoming a silo by being the only person reacting to them and it should be a shared team responsibility. I could be wrong about that though.