Immigrant Rights / Civil Rights Movement! A Librarian at the Kitchen Table. No. 361.

Immigrant Rights / Civil Rights Movement!
National Grassroots Immigrant Strategy Conference
Friday - Sunday July 28-30, 2006
American University.Washington, DC.

The success of May 1st's "A Day Without Immigrants" has been an historical turning point for the immigrant rights movement.

At this point it is vitally important for the immigrant rights movement to keep the momentum going, and there is an urgent need for national meetings in which community/grassroots immigrant activists can meet face-to-face to discuss how to build a new national, broad-based, immigrant rights/civil rights movement, and to set a 6-9 month national strategy for this movement.

Why? despite our massive actions across the street, on Thursday, May 25, the U.S. Senate voted 62-36 to approved a bipartisan immigration 'reform' bill (S. 2611), calling for increase border security, guest worker program, more immigration enforcement, and the immigrant legalization program.

Although the bill includes some positive provisions that would reduce the backlog in family-based immigration, as well as AgJobs, DREAM Act, and a legalization program; however, a quick analysis from Immigrant Legal Resource Center point out that the positive provisions in the bill have been fatally compromised by the negative measures included in the bill. Such as: militarization of the border, more government power to deport immigrants, flawed and unrealistic legalization program, and guest worker program as a new kind of 'slave labor.' (see below)

Even worse, when the Senate bill meet with the House bill (HR 4437, passed last December) at the conference committee to draft the final bill (could be before or after the November election), it'll not get better, but will get worse--where the positive provisions on the Senate bill may disappear, but the worse part of the bill will be kept.

Therefore, We should expect our struggle will be still long and difficult, and we need to prepare for a long campaign to defeat the racist anti-immigrant bills, and the institutionalized racist government anti-immigrant policies.

--read more.