McCain on Immigration, DMI on Immigration

Elana Levin

McCain on Immigration, DMI on Immigration

Speaking to an audience the political equivalent of a "sold-out concert crowd", yesterday Senator John McCain laid out his vision for immigration reform (the McCain/Kennedy Bill) to a New York area audience. The sheer number of people in attendance shows how hungry the public is for answers and leadership around the immigration issue.

DMI's Associate Research Director Amy Traub has a great op-ed in today's Newsday that talks specifically about how the vacuum of sound leadership in DC has left localities like Long Island to deal with the problem on their own. She lays out what's not working with the current proposals and what DMI would prescribe for an immigration policy to strengthen and expand the middle class and aspiring middle class.

Meanwhile back at McCain's town hall meeting the docket included not only an interesting array of congress members but immigrants themselves telling their stories. The personal stories illustrated how broken the current system is and why reactionary policies like the one created by Rep. Sensenbrenner are both bad for this country and impossible to enforce.

One speaker told of her "immigration nightmare". She was brought to the US from the Republic of Chad when she was four years old by her mother. Her parents both died when she was a teen and though her mother had been applying for a green card, the daughter was orphaned without legal immigration status. Dispite her tragic situation she went on to college and earned an MPA. She is now working in the mayor's budgetary office but she lives in fear every day of being deported back to a country that she has no ties to and doesn't even speak the language of.

The other immigrants who spoke showed that she is far from alone in being trapped by a broken system.

News site The NewStandard reported about DMI's mixed evaluation of the McCain/Kennedy bill today. According to the article DMI is not alone in our concerns about the bill's lack of full protection for workers. Do check-out the artilcle, it is a great read. The reporter writes that DMI "appears to be making inroads with immigrant and labor groups and may fundamentally change the way many advocates see the issue". Wow. I'm not sure if DMI's quite there yet in terms of our place in the debate but I'd love to here your thoughts on that.

Posted at 12:52 PM, Feb 28, 2006 in Immigration | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Comments

To avoid situations like the NYT byline scandals I'd like to acknowledge that the inside reporting on the McCain event is basically plagerized from my intern (and sometime blogger) Sarah Solon.

She takes better notes than me.

Well, McCain's position seemes better than Sensenbernners, but that's not saying much. I NEVER trusted McCain, i don't trust any republicans, espicaily republicans who publicaly hug & kiss GW Bush, a man who used the mist foul kind of race bating to win the votes of the racist crackers in the 2000 South Carolina facis-er, Republican Primary.

The fact is the Republicans are split between the crazy Pat Robertson/James Dobson Christian Fasicsts who are racist to the core of their rotten souls, and the corprate GE/ExxonMobil fascists who want to have immigration laws that alow them to have what would be esstianly slave labor in the US. McCain falls into the latter catagory.

That said, the bill does apear to be an improvement over the mess we have now, but i am concerned over the appearnce that it seemes to leave imagrants at the mercy of their employers with regrads to weather they can stay in the country or not.