Written by Andrew Wainer, Immigration Policy Analyst at Bread for the World Institute.
2011 was a record year for U.S. farmers, with farm income topping $100 billion. This includes sales of $22 billion in fruits and nuts and $21 billion in vegetables and melons – crops that rely on immigrant farm labor.
But even as U.S. farmers prospered in 2011, those working on farms had less to celebrate.
The nation’s agricultural mecca – Fresno Country, California – had the state’s highest agricultural sales ($5.9 billion) and its highest poverty rate – 27 percent. More than 36 percent of the county’s children were poor, also the highest rate in the state. As one agricultural expert puts it, “High farm sales and high poverty rates often go together.”
Read the complete blog here.
From Melanie Fox, Friends Committee on National Legislation.
Small steps may be the key to reforming our largely unjust and broken immigration system.
One of those small steps is exactly what the nation witnessed when H.R. 3012 was passed by a whopping 389 votes in the House. The vote, which took place last Tuesday night, marks the first immigration bill that has passed either chamber of Congress with bipartisan support since the DREAM Act passed the House in 2010. H.R. 3012, also know as The Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2011, has two main pieces to it.
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From Kathy O’Leary, Coordinator at Pax Christi NJ.
As I sat down to write this blog post, about our upcoming protest on December 7th in Newark over the for-profit immigration detention contract, I was tempted to lead with statistics about the percentage of foreign born residents in Essex County. Then I remembered a quote from a book on racial justice by Father Bryan Massingale. “We act justly not because we are intellectually convinced, but because we are passionately moved. Compassion moves the will to justice.”
As a movement and as individual activists, there is a tendency toward providing facts, data and statistics that support just immigration policy. There is the belief that if only we could effectively combat the tremendous body of misinformation we would prevail. The problem is that one of the primary tactics of the campaign against immigration reform is an attempt to dehumanize an entire group of people.
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