Immigration Rights Topic of Thursday Town Hall Meeting

Immigrant rights and community activists will meet Thursday, 5/31, to discuss defending immigrant rights in the face of the recently proposed Senate immigration bill. Speakers, including Nativo Lopez, President of the Mexican American Political Association and local activists, will talk about the immigrant rights movement’s demands, including improving worker rights, giving legalization for all immigrants, declaring DC a sanctuary city, and ending raids and deportations. “Raids and deportations are tearing families apart,” says David Thurston of the DC Committee for Immigrant Rights, adding that the Senate immigration bill proposes “more punitive measures that will fail to deliver genuine immigration reform.” In related news, the Washington Post reports the Senate approved an amendment, last Wednesday, to the bill’s guest worker language that limits the number of workers to 200,000. The proposed guest worker program would “massively expand the model” of the current guest worker program that has allowed exploitation of workers and employers to “profit substantially from that exploitation” and “drive down wages and workplace standards,” said Linda Chavez Thompson, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President, in a recent press release.