February 12, 2008 9:29 AM
Last night the Long Island Immigrant Alliance held the kickoff event for its Truth About Immigrants Campaign. The campaign is designed to counter the hateful rhetoric about immigration with fact-filled presentations.
Norman Eng from the New York Immigration Coalition told the audience that one of the great fallacies of the immigration debate is that we have done nothing to stop illegal immigration and that we just need to get tougher. He pointed out that there has been a massive expansion of immigration enforcement since the mid-1990s and entering the U.S. illegally has become so dangerous that 200-300 undocumented immigrants die each year in the attempt, but that the pull of jobs is so great that hundreds of thousands of people risk their lives and freedom each year to make the try.
The problem, he said, is that there is a real need for the labor, and a desperation to work, but no rational structure for putting employer and worker together legally. There are only 5,000 low skilled employment based immigrant visas available each year in an economy that uses three quarters of a million undocumented immigrants to perform agricultural work alone. As long as the demand for labor cannot be met legally, it will be met through the current cruel system.
The Long Island Immigrant Alliance and its member groups hope that giving Long Islanders real information will help them make informed judgements about the immigration issue and help to see the faces of their immigrant neighbors.
For more info on the campaign, click on the link below:
http://thenyic.org/templates/documentFinder.asp?did=813
Scroll to the bottom to get some great fact sheets to use in your community.
[Sorry guys, but I still can't figure out how to embed hyperlinks with this program]