'Mixed-status' families look to Obama

The Washington Post reports:

The people were of different nationalities and backgrounds, but they had a common refrain: Don't split up our families.

The 300-plus people who attended the meeting Saturday at St. Pius Church in the Pilsen neighborhood were sending a reminder to President-elect Barack Obama to keep his promise to address immigration reform.

"I expect Barack Obama, our engine for change, will do everything he can to keep his promise for comprehensive immigration reform that reunites families who are already separated and keeps families together," said Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D), who called the meeting and who in the next Congress will reintroduce immigration legislation he co-sponsored last year.

Chicago, Obama's home, has in recent years been at the forefront of the battle over immigration. The wave of massive marches for immigrant rights in 2006 started here, and Chicago groups -- including the grass-roots organization La Familia Latina Unida -- have for several years taken the lead nationally on "mixed-status" families.

Read the rest of "'Mixed-status' families look to Obama" here.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Comments

[budswisr]

I want our on the books immigration laws enforced. Is it to much to ask people who get paid to enforce our laws to do thier jobs or seek employement elsewhere?

[southoc]

People come here illegaly and pop out kids so they can stay then are shocked when they are forced to separate. Most convicted criminals are separated from their families in jail. Commit a crime and you should pay the piper.

"Mixed status" is just another eupahmism for criminal.

[Richard Bond]

It always gets me when people complain about mixed status families as if that were a cause for favorable consideration when it exactly the opposite. The majority of illegal aliens can not afford to come here on their own and their coming here was financed by the friends and relatives already here. That the communities they come from have become communities devoid of working age adults is to a great degree their own fault.

The amount of money that it takes to bring someone up here is very similar to the amount that it takes to create a job or tools to increase the amount of income a worker makes in Latin America. Their remittances are now being spent mostly on manufactured food and clothing. What little is spent on durable goods go to new houses that are being designed more for conspicuous consumption than return on investment. Far more money goes to the cost of bringing in more illegal aliens than giving their old communities and family living there a firm foundation.

So because they chose to act in a particular way. A way that their own representatives back in their original countries at their behest have sought to see be roundly punished if the same sort of relocation were made into instead out of those countries. We are told that we must accomodate them and others they wish to bring in here forever. If illegal aliensare here in mixed families with citizens and legal immigrants and as such they should be allowed to use it as a rationale for continued work and residence legalizing them will give their relatives abroad the same rationalization.

It is not a matter of hate of outsiders that drives most of the opposition to illegal aliens. Americans owe no more to outsiders than do the citizens of other countries. As the governments elected by the same people who come in here illegally do not accomodate outsiders in their home countries it makes little sense to blame hate. Americans are not inferior to say Mexicans in terms of their rights within their own counties. An exception should not be made which protects the Mexicans in Mexico but not the Americans in the United States.

Mexicans and other Latinos expect adherence to their counties' immigration laws and respect for their rights in their countries. Fairness consists of not demanding to have more given to you than you give in turn. There are laws that require places of business and the owners of buildings to provide for people who are unequal in the terms of there abilities this is the Americans Disabilities Law. Illegal immigrants however have to expect the same rights here that they hold fast to in their legal countries as they are not and should not expect to be treated as Mr Guttierez wants as though they were a race of moral cripples.