Immigration rights activists call for postcards to Congress
By Kevin Clerici, kclerici@VenturaCountyStar.com
Organizers of recent immigrant rights marches are urging people to sign postcards to Congress in support of "realistic and humane" immigration reform.
The postcard drive is part of a national lobbying effort to transform street passions into a mass campaign for civic action, said Lauro Barrajas, director for the Oxnard region of the United Farm Workers of America union.
Most urgent is a campaign to defeat a House Republican bill that would make felons of undocumented immigrants and those who assist them.
"We are making a commitment to continue to organize and mobilize," Barrajas said in Oxnard, the site of one of six UFW news conferences held Wednesday in California and Texas.
Religious, labor and community groups have announced they would designate May 17 as a national lobbying day, sending immigrant advocates from around the nation to Washington and hundreds of thousands of postcards to influence the shaping of an immigration bill. The nation has an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants.
The local UFW and a coalition of immigrant rights groups hope to send 5,000 postcards from Ventura County, Barrajas said.
The coalition also wants to use the fierce debate over immigration to prompt record numbers of immigrants to naturalize and register to vote — a potentially powerful voting bloc, said Denis O’Leary, a member of the local League of United Latin American Citizens.
"This group (immigrants) has not voiced their opinions in the past to gain the attention of the politicians that represent them," O’Leary said.
The postcards urge lawmakers to enact "realistic and humane" legislation that would offer more visas to keep families together and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
Since March, hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their supporters have staged marches, rallies, school walkouts and boycotts across the nation in support of immigrant rights.
The next major marches are being planned for Labor Day in Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C., Barrajas said.
Local coalition members include the UFW, LULAC, Hermandad Mexicana, Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, Citizens for Peaceful Resolutions and the Committee on Raza Rights.
"We all have different ideologies, but we want to move forward together," said Francisco Romero, a Raza Rights member. "With unity, there is power."