Moving Forward Together: Families, Veterans, Clergy, Members of Congress Push for Immigration Reform

October 14, 2009

U.S. Capitol Event Drives Home Message: Don’t Break Up Our Families

Washington, DC – Today, the Reform Immigration FOR America campaign brought together immigrant and veterans’ families, clergy, and Members of Congress for a vigil on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol to renew the push for comprehensive immigration reform in the 111^th Congress.  Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-IL), flanked by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY), Chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA), and Congressional Black Caucus Member Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY), presented the outline of a progressive immigration reform bill he is crafting and planning to introduce in the coming weeks.  Over 750 individuals from at least 15 states (AZ, CA, FL, GA, IL, MA, MI, MN, NY, NJ, OH, PA, RI, TX, and WA) came to Washington to meet with Members of Congress during the day, culminating in a prayer vigil and gathering with an additional 2,500 people from the DC, Maryland, and Virginia area in the afternoon.  During the day and over the weekend, events in 30 cities marked the occasion and underscored the national urgency behind immigration reform.

The following is a statement by Ali Noorani, Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum, a non-partisan, non-profit, pro-immigrant advocacy organization in Washington that is among the organizations leading the Reform Immigration FOR America campaign.

The message from immigrants today is profoundly simple: Don’t break up my family. Let our parents raise their own children with families intact.  Keep parents and grandparents who are our family’s immigrant pioneers out of jail.  Allow our children, our parents, and our families to come to this country legally with a visa and rights and dignity.

If we had a functioning legal immigration system, people would use it.  But we don’t, so they can’t.  That keeps family members apart, makes people wait decades for legal permission to work here, and keeps countless families living in fear of separation through deportation.

Right now, the fantasy of mass deportation or expelling millions of families over years and years is delaying the day when we make citizens and tax-payers out of our workforce and secure the rights of all working people in the process by passing immigration reform.

Requiring people in this country illegally to get legal in order to stay here is not a handout; it’s the only sensible solution to having 12,000,000 people living here without permission.  Creating mechanisms to set reasonable immigration limits for the future is the only path to controlled borders.  Enforcing our laws is not sufficient if those laws are out-of-date, unrealistically restrictive, and completely divorced from reality.

Immigration reform is too often discounted as just another political issue by some in Washington, but to immigrants and millions more who share this country with them, it a deeply personal issue of keeping families together.

Congress must respond in a manner that holds true to our values as a nation.  Today, several important Members of Congress have laid down a path toward getting this done.  Expectations that President Obama and Congress will fix what is broken about our current immigration system run high and time is ticking until the next election.  Congressional leaders who step up and craft bills to move us forward understand the urgency for action and the need to uncork the gridlock that has prevented progress for years.

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