Standing FIRM Summit Pushes for Immigration Reform

As the first major gathering of immigrant-rights groups of the new year, the ‘Standing FIRM’ Summit focused on passing comprehensive immigration reform. Held just days after President Bush’s State of the Union address, immigrant rights coalition leaders and grassroots groups were eager to complete a plan for 2007.

Ana Amaral, an immigrant worker justice organizer explained her expectations for the event. “We are here to figure out how to build alliances with one another,” she said. “There are major immigration problems in this country and we are trying to make a change, this has to happen on a national level.”

Amaral, who works to expose and resolve prejudices in the workplace, said she benefited greatly from the ‘Black Brown and Beyond’ work sessions that were offered at the conference. These group strategy sessions explored the commonalities of people of color in America. Attendants discussed alliance building strategies between different ethnic groups in the United States.

Other sessions focused on issues including changing public perceptions of immigrants, intergenerational community organizing, self-care and building civic participation strategies.

Josh Hoyt, a member of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, led a group discussion about developing a civic participation strategy for the 2007-08 elections. Community-based groups, representing immigrants from around the world, shared goals for promoting immigrant and refugee voter participation. Some groups made goals to register entire communities to vote while others hoped to open democracy schools, which teach citizens and activists how to gain rights through self-governance and confrontation of corporate control.

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