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learn more Working for Justice in Our Communities Since 1929
The fate of almost a million lives could be decided in the next six hours. As a voter, as a millenial, as a migrant, as a Guatemalan, I'm writing to say that I will be watching along with the vast majority of those who will determine the future of the United States of America.
It is imperative that you focus on these Senators. If you've called already, call again. If you've called again, ask five friends to do the same. If you've done all that, here are some more actions you can take.
The "DREAM Now Series: Letters to Barack Obama" is a social media campaign that launched Monday, July 19, to underscore the urgent need to pass the DREAM Act. The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, S. 729, would help tens of thousands of young people, American in all but paperwork, to earn legal status, provided they graduate from U.S. high schools, have good moral character, and complete either two years of college or military service. With broader comprehensive immigration reform stuck in partisan gridlock, the time is now for the White House and Congress to step up and pass the DREAM Act!
Dear Mr. President,
My name is Saad Nabeel and I am writing to you from Bangladesh. Prior to my arrival in this nation, I lived in the United States for 15 years. My parents brought me to America at age three. It is the only home I know. I used to attend the University of Texas at Arlington with a full scholarship in Electrical Engineering. Through no fault of my own I was forced to leave my home, friends, possessions, and most importantly, my education behind.
November 3rd 2009 is a day I will never forget. My mother called me and told me that my father had been detained by ICE and that we needed to leave immediately to Canada to seek refugee status. Being an only child, I had to take care of my mother and go with her.
The "DREAM Now Series: Letters to Barack Obama" is a social media campaign that launched Monday, July 19, to underscore the urgent need to pass the DREAM Act. The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, S. 729, would help tens of thousands of young people, American in all but paperwork, to earn legal status, provided they graduate from U.S. high schools, have good moral character, and complete either two years of college or military service. With broader comprehensive immigration reform stuck in partisan gridlock, the time is now for the White House and Congress to step up and pass the DREAM Act!
Dear Mr. President,
My name is Lizbeth Mateo and I am undocumented. On May 17th, on the 56th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, I, along with Mohammad Abdollahi, Yahaira Carrillo and two others, became the first undocumented students to risk deportation by staging a sit-in inside Senator McCain's office in Tucson, Arizona, to demand the immediate passage of the DREAM Act. As a result of that sit-in we were arrested, turned over to ICE, and we now face deportation
The "DREAM Now Series: Letters to Barack Obama" is a social media campaign that launched Monday, July 19, to underscore the urgent need to pass the DREAM Act. The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, S. 729, would help tens of thousands of young people, American in all but paperwork, to earn legal status, provided they graduate from U.S. high schools, have good moral character, and complete either two years of college or military service. With broader comprehensive immigration reform stuck in partisan gridlock, the time is now for the White House and Congress to step up and pass the DREAM Act!
Dear Mr. President,
My name is Carlos and I'm a 23 year old undocumented immigrant from Caracas, Venezuela. I want to legalize my immigration status in this country through the passage of DREAM Act this year. For too long have I lived in the U.S. without papers. It has been over 20 years, now. I want to legalize my immigration status in order to fulfill my dreams of becoming a young professional in architecture.
In case you missed it, the Associated Press recently covered our request for a meeting with Senator Scott Brown (R-Mass.). We are asking Sen. Brown to meet with us before April 17.
Harvard College Act on a Dream has been trying to meet with Sen. Brown since he was first elected at the beginning of the semester. We were told that his office was a mess the first couple of months, but we were finally asked to fax our meeting request to his office. We sent the fax on March 5, 2010.
After not getting a commitment to a meeting for over a month, we were forced to take our meeting request public. We
joined forces with the Student
Immigrant Movement to set up an
online petition which already has over 100 signatures (please sign
it if you haven't done so, yet). The online petition resulted in
coverage from the AP, and now our request is all over the web. We were
happy to hear through the AP that his office has received our meeting
request and will shortly ask for more information from us.
Still, it's going to take a lot more than an AP article and a hundred petition signatures to secure a meeting with Brown. Here are some things you can do to help:
SIGN the petition at change.org and ask all of your friends and family to do the same, especially if they are Massachusetts residents.
CALL Brown's D.C. office (202-224-4543) and his local office (617-565-3170) to ask whether or not Brown will meet with us before April 17.
JOIN the Facebook group and ask your Facebook friends to do the same
HELP us fight any misinformation or nativism that you see online regarding our meeting request.
The idiocy expelled out all over the blogs, tv, and radio has passed as the immigration debate for too long. It is the rhetorical and intellectual equivalent of tic-tac-toe, The anti-freedom, anti-equality, anti-reality, anti-immigrant arguments need to be exposed for what they are; hysteria and tyranny. I think the audience for this crowd and their adherents are fewer than they suppose, and I hope that there are many among them whose minds can be changed, or who are at least interested in using their minds. Perhaps there are many within the ranks of the self-proclaimed "conservatives", "patriots", or "republicans" who are looking for arguments to pivot away from the dregs of the political right.
I want to address those who can be persuaded by reason, and are interested in more than the worn out clanging from people who would have you believe there are aliens living among us. The choice of the word 'alien' by the immigrant haters is obviously intended to literally alienate the immigrant as the consummate other. But it also exposes the infantile underpinnings of their thinking. Their appeal is to the visceral, those who are only interested in short cuts to thinking. They constantly deploy alien as their pejorative of choice because so many negative and frightening connotations attach to the word, but also because they believe in an America that is so encapsulated within a white-dominant cultural experience. They think it's not a leap to convince us that a brown man speaking something other than English is deeply threatening and somehow un-human.
Their ideas need to be exposed as extremist and un-American because they are.
I frequently hear the tired old song that our immigration system is broken and must be fixed. Inevitably, the next line is a conclusory shortcut to thinking that involves massive fencing, rounding up morenos with military tactics, the forced separation of families, demonizing Spanish, or some combination thereof. Changing the debate surrounding immigration policy, and turning others to see immigrants as persons and not objects, requires that we reject the terms that are carelessly taken for granted. So I begin with this. I challenge the very premise that the system is broken at all.
We do not have upwards of 12 million people living here without legal status because the system is broken. They are here because the forces that have impelled them to come to our country are beyond the scope of unilateral government control, and because the political myths and the rhetorical frames that prevail in our discourse keep our politicians and policy makers from frankly admitting this to the American public.
This creates government paralysis when it comes to making sound immigration policy because meaningful reform will require us to recognize that policy solutions must involve compromising our traditional definition of sovereignty. This cooperation with other governments means a massive investment in the economic development of Latin America, and yes, the deregulation of labor markets in the form of an open border policy within the NAFTA block.
Faced with the daunting task of taking on a policy issue of this complexity, it isn't surprising that our political establishment chooses to treat the issue only when it serves as a prop in the political theater. What those who insist the system is broken have missed, however, is that broken things do not work as intended. The situation we have with our neighbors and family members the government calls "aliens" is working exactly the way they want it to.
Part One of "Lou Dobbs' Convention of Lies" analyzed several distortions Lou made on his September 10th edition of Lou Dobbs Tonight, at a rally by the Federation for American Immigration Reform. For Part Two, click on the video below:
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Originally posted on 
I frequently hear the tired old song that our immigration system is broken and must be fixed. Inevitably, the next line is a conclusory shortcut to thinking that involves massive fencing, rounding up morenos with military tactics, the forced separation of families, demonizing Spanish, or some combination thereof. Changing the debate surrounding immigration policy, and turning others to see immigrants as persons and not objects, requires that we reject the terms that are carelessly taken for granted. So I begin with this. I challenge the very premise that the system is broken at all.
Receive information on the latest action items, media campaigns, and legislative initiatives from ProMigrant
No spam or press release dumps from DC advocacy groups, lobbyists, or politicos. No requests for donations, or re-directs to astroturf groups looking to harvest your e-mail information.
Just real action for real change from real grassroots activists.
