This week, the extremist anti-immigrant group, Americans for Legal Immigration Political Action Committee (ALIPAC), launched a political ad which, incredibly, smears a United States senator for accepting an award from a civil rights organization and announcing that he intends to stand up to bigots. ALIPAC has posted this video to Youtube and sent an email to its supporters, asking them to award it high ratings.

Well, on the one hand, ALIPAC’s president, William Gheen, is a relentless self-promoting egomaniac prone to exaggeration who thinks there are 58 states and wants Lou Dobbs to be President of the United States. This past June, he began a letter to the editor to the Charlotte Observer with the statement, “I’m not a murdering racist…”

On the other hand, ALIPAC has been designated a nativist, extremist organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League, and an anti-immigrant menace by the Observer. He engages in textbook immigrant bashing, claiming that immigrants are raping and pillaging communities and bringing countless diseases into this country. The poisonous climate in North Carolina with regard to immigrants has been attributed in part to such antics.

Unfortunately, Gheen is an anti-immigrant bigot with a platform. He is a frequent guest on cable television and talk radio, where he is introduced as an “immigration expert,” an “expert” who’s been quoted as saying that “illegal aliens in this country have set up ethnic cleansing zones, ethnic cleansing zones where if you walk past the wrong sign post, the invisible line, you’re under the threat of death.”

Gheen is now going after elected officials on both sides of the aisle and established civil rights organizations, such as the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), that have been pushing back against the presence of hate and extremist groups in the immigration debate. Please help us send Gheen and his organization the message that his immigrant scapegoating is unacceptable and we will not stand for his hate-filled stunts.

Go to YouTube and vote against ALIPAC’s video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dUvVcBQFU. Comment on it. Show the world that this group of extremists is not representative of what most people think. Stand up to the demonizing of our civil rights institutions.

Let’s stand up to ALIPAC and its hate together. Please forward this email to five of your friends and ask them to sign up for We Can Stop the Hate alerts. Thank you for everything you do.

Sincerely,
NCLR

Hi.

My name is Adriana.

I’m writing to you from the Fast for Our Future encampment at Placita Olvera in Los Angeles.  I’ve been fasting on water for 14 days. I want to tell you a little bit about myself and urge you to do everything you can to make sure that everyone you know signs the Pledge to vote for immigrant rights at www.fastforourfuture.com.

I’m a 19-year-old photojournalism major at Santa Monica College. I have 2 jobs, as a waitress and as a photo assistant. One of my favorite things to do in the whole world is eat homemade nachos while watching the original Planet of the Apes. One of the greatest movies ever made…

I decided to join the Fast as soon as I heard about it because of people like my parents. They came here from Mexico in the 70s without papers and started over from scratch. I never had a birthday party because they were always working to give my brother and I a better life. Somehow, after another long, hard day at work, my dad usually still had the energy to read me a bedtime story. I’m fasting because no child should have to grow up without their parents, and the enforcement of our unjust immigration laws is tearing mothers and fathers away from so many children. This can’t go on… please help us by signing the Pledge and sending it to everyone you know right now.

I’ll be fasting until 1 million people like you sign the Pledge and commit to uphold the promise we made in 2006: Today we march, tomorrow we vote. Today is just 7 days away.

Thanks for everything you do - it means so much to every one of us.

Adriana

PS

Every person counts. Please forward this email to all your friends, asking them to sign the pledge.

© 2008 THERISEMOVEMENT.ORG

World economies will collapse without the 40 million undocumented migrant workers, says Sharan Burrow, president of the International Trade Union Confederation and chairperson for the civil society days at the Second Global Forum on Migration and Development being held at the Philippine International Convention Center.

Sharan Burrow, president of the International Trade Union Confederation and conference chairperson, said that if all irregular migrant workers cease their labor, “California will collapse before breakfast, London before lunch, and most of Europe just before dinner.”

Read more here.

Protests for migrants rights marked the opening of the conference.

Diaz was formerly a DREAMer and now she can work on obtaining her American citizenship. We are happy for Diaz and everyone that can get a hardship waiver, which is hard to qualify for since one has to proof actual hardship to a U.S. citizen upon deportation. And one needs to have the heterosexual privilege of marriage to qualify for citizenship through marriage like Diaz in this case. Bottom-line: Adjustment through marriage is no guarantee for citizenship and the ‘illegal alien’ may often be required to stay in a foreign country that they do not know for several years.

Source - The Oregonian (Portland, Oregon)

BYLINE: GOSIA WOZNIACKA

Deported two years ago to a country she knew only as a child, 22-year-old Monica Diaz has returned to Oregon –legally.

Her mother and brother remain in Guatemala after the family lost a decade-old battle for political asylum. Diaz married a U.S. citizen, allowing her to reunite with her father and U.S.-born younger sister, who had stayed behind in Beaverton.

Her experience illustrates the price that U.S.-raised undocumented children can pay for their parents’ decision to bring them across the border.

At the airport Thursday night, her father, Luis Diaz Sr., husband, Jason Ramos, 14-year-old Jennifer Diaz and family friends waited nervously with a dozen roses and balloons.

“Monica!” Jennifer screamed and ran toward a tiny-framed young woman with a ponytail of curls. Then Luis Diaz embraced his daughter. They held each other for a long time. Monica Diaz wiped back tears.

After retrieving luggage, the family hurried out to fulfill Diaz’s American craving: a meal from KFC.

The homecoming was bittersweet. Diaz’s brother, Luis Jr., who also married his American girlfriend, may be eligible to return. But their mother, Irma, who brought her two children across the border illegally in 1993, will remain in Guatemala.

Diaz was granted a hardship waiver to remove the 10-year ban on entering the United States, which she acquired for living in the United States illegally. To get the waiver, Diaz’s attorney Tilman Hasche said, a person has to show their absence will pose extreme hardship to a U.S.-citizen spouse or parent. Good moral character, the family’s asylum application and the fact that Diaz was brought across the border as a child were also considered, Hasche said.

Diaz came back thinner. She survived, she said, but she did not adapt to Guatemala. While she’s not keen to repeat living in a developing country –with no traffic rules, poverty and stifling heat –she says the hardship was a transformative experience.

“The experience in Guatemala has made me more responsible,” Diaz said. “I had to grow up really fast.”

Big transition

When she arrived to Escuintla, Guatemala, the outgoing Westview High School graduate became depressed and cried often, she said. She felt unsafe in a place where crime was rampant, streets dirty and running water scarce, she said.

“I just didn’t like it,” Diaz said. “I didn’t know anybody, I didn’t feel safe. I felt like I’m an American, because that’s where I was raised.”

(more…)