The Local newsletter is your free, daily guide to life in Colorado. For locals, by locals. Sign up today!
No one is happy with the proposed immigration reform compromise legislation. The right believes it’s amnesty and the left believes it weakens principles of family reunification and will create a permanent underclass of workers.
Nothing will happen before Memorial Day, and the real debate over the future of the 12 million undocumented residents among us, has been postponed to June.
What can you do in the meantime to get up to speed? Read the bill. It’s 326 pages and available
If you’re not sure of the answers, check with your older family members and the Ellis Island Data base.
In a future post, I’ll write about how my great-great grandfather got to the U.S. in the 1870’s or 80’s from Russia where he was a lobster fisherman near the Black Sea. I was only eight when he died, and I didn’t have time to ask him if he came here legally or not. I do know that he escaped religious persecution and that his wife and five children came later in separate crossings.
I think we need to humanize the plight of the immigrants and by telling their stories, we will have a greater appreciation of who they are and their values, and hopefully discover, they are not much different than us.
