How to Win the Immigration Debate and Beat Back ICE's Emerging Police State
Immigrants built this country and remain a vital part of our communities. Yet immigration has become a political hot potato in recent years. With Congress held hostage to a vocal minority of hard-line immigration restrictionists stirred up by right-wing websites and talk-radio, the Bush administration has launched a series of showy “crack-downs” that have divided working families and transferred billions into the hands of well-connected DHS contractors, but done nothing to reform a deeply dysfunctional immigration system. We can do better.
Come by for a lively discussion of this vitally important issue with activists speaking from a variety of perspectives.
Marisa Treviño is a syndicated opinion journalist, who blogs about issues of importance to the Latino community, at the English-language site Latina Lista.
Working with ethnic and mainstream media, Treviño's columns are carried in USA Today and news publications/sites across the country.
Joshua Holland is a senior writer at AlterNet, where he edits the popular progressive site's immigration and corporate accountability coverage. Holland's book on progressive immigration reform, The Illegal Jobs Scam, will be published by AlterNet Books in late 2008.
Duke is an active blogger at various Progressive websites. In 2005 he founded Migra Matters – Progressive Immigration Reform, one of the first single-issue blogs to tackle the complex topic of immigration. Since then he has written exclusively on immigration reform and migrant issues, focusing on policy, legislation, research and the politics surrounding the issue.
Recently he joined forces with prominent pro-migrant and human-rights bloggers to found The Sanctuary, an on-line community centered on migrant issues that brings together new media, on-line activists, and members of established immigrant-rights organizations and advocacy groups to work towards meaningful reform
Jackie Mahendra manages the web presence and online organizing efforts of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR). Jackie coordinates with state and national bloggers to bring a humane, pro-migrant voice to the online debate, highlighting the Coalition’s deep offline organizing work whenever possible. While ICIRR has helped to make Illinois one of the most immigrant-friendly states in the U.S, it also faces an aggressive and highly vocal opposition on the web, which has emerged as the new battleground of the immigrant rights movement.
