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And I'm proud that my law firm is one of the first to volunteer. From the American Immigration Lawyers Association:
The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) is pleased to announce the AILA DREAM Defenders (AD2) pro bono program, which will support young adults who would benefit from the DREAM Act if it were to pass Congress and be signed into law. AILA has committed to match qualifying young adults with immigration attorneys who will provide legal services free of charge. The DREAM Defenders program is a collaboration between AILA, the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, the National Immigration Law Center, DREAM Activist, United We Dream, the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, and Educators for Fair Consideration, and is the first national partnership of its kind.
AILA will receive cases from its coalition partners, which will then be passed on to AILA member attorneys who will provide pro bono services as AD2 volunteers. "The legal assistance we can provide is essential," said AILA Immediate Past-President David Leopold. "Without an attorney beside them, DREAM Act candidates, who are educated and ready to contribute to our society, may find themselves in a tough situation. With AD2, we really are defending dreams; this is the next generation of leaders and entrepreneurs that America needs to prosper."
Many national organizations have been engaged in advocacy efforts to promote the DREAM Act and have also taken action to protect individual DREAMers from deportation. "This partnership of DREAM Defenders strengthens our advocacy campaigns," said Mohammad Abdollahi of DREAM Activist, an online action and resource network for DREAMers and their allies. "Never before have we been able to list legal representation among our cache of tools for DREAMers. AILA's participation makes the push for change more concrete. We can all help these promising young people together."
AILA President Eleanor Pelta said of AD2 and the new DREAM Defenders partnership, "I'm very proud of this venture. For several years, AILA attorneys have worked with non profit organizations to assist DREAMers with pro bono legal representation. This partnership builds on their work by creating a formal referral process that DREAM advocacy organizations can use to match individual cases with AILA's AD2 attorneys."
Young Children Found Working in Fields Across America
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/slideshow?id=8953113
Hispanic Organizations Give Obama and Congress a C
By JULIA PRESTON
For Latinos, the lack of movement toward an immigration overhaul to give legal status to illegal immigrants overshadowed progress on other issues, Hispanic leaders said.
"The amount of enforcement activity by the administration has been a great disappointment to our community," Ms. Rodr�guez L�pez said.
Immigration "is an American problem," said Carmen Segarra, national policy chairwoman of the Hispanic National Bar Association. "This is not a Republican problem or a Democratic problem."
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An American problem? That's funny, Hispanic group leaders seem to think that we should not enforce immigration law and grant amnesty simply because people of their ethnicity happen to be those mostly in violation of it. If the majority of the illegally present were not Hispanic, would they even care about the issue? Or would they be against amnesty so as not to dillute their power and "greatly disappointed" if the law were NOT enforced? I have more respect for true open border ideologues, however misguided, who think unlimited immigration is in the American interest (although often they too want the law ignored just because they disagree with it). It's ridiculous to get lectured to by people who are patently about their self-interest, not the American interest.
They want child labor and whatever the age cut-off, they'll just go lower. That's a similar problem with the guest worker concept. The more you put in protections and benefits for the workers, the less the grower will want to use it and simply fall back on illegal labor. Thus, if you have to make the guest worker program more slave-like and against American values in order to get participation in it, what's the point? Whatever guest worker plan we have or come up with, then when it's not used we'll hear "we need a REAL guest worker program!"