Comprehensive immigration reform is what everyone is talking about locally, nationally, and around the world. Many organizations have come forward to promote justice, and to evaluate the treatment that human beings of other nations are receiving.

Bishop Thomas Wenski of the Diocese of Orlando Florida states that, “The so-called “illegals” are so not because they wish to defy the law, but because the law does not provide them with channels to regularize their status in our country, which needs their labor. They are not breaking the law, the law is breaking them.”

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops “has long advocated for policies that respect the human dignity of immigrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, and other people on the move.” (Statement by Bishop John Wester, Bishop of Salt Lake City, Utah).
 

Virgilio Guerra

A proper immigration reform is what is needed in order to safeguard and protect the dignity of every family in our nation. Immigrants migrate without a fault of their own. They have to risk their lives because for some that is the only way of survival.

There needs to be a reformation in three areas: immigration, economics, and globalization. Nations are in dire need and what are we doing to alleviate the sufferings? Now it is the time to be creative and develop jobs, and learn the lessons to spend money wisely.

The question remains, what are we doing to repair the broken immigration system? Our nation has lived for too long with a broken immigration system, which needs a reform. Families have been separated with no possibilities of re-uniting in a short period of time. People of poor nations need authentic developments. People have the right to migrate because they do not have the right developments. Migration comes out of necessity.

The Barack Obama administration has promised to begin addressing the issue of immigration at the beginning of the fall of this year. His plan, as recently reported in the New York Times, includes looking into a path to legalization to the 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.

Immigrants have a great impact to the economy because they are hard-working people and their skills as entrepreneurs are a great asset to the society. In all these contributions we should add that immigrants do the jobs that many U.S.-Americans do not want to do.

Since the George W. Bush administration, it has been cited that we have more than 12 million undocumented workers in the United States. Many of these workers have relatives that are U.S.-American citizens and lawful permanent resident’s family members. Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, Inc. (ABLE) recently cited that “U.S citizens may have to wait for as much as 16 years to be re-united with family members, such as children over the age of 21.”

Recently, a number of community leaders from the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), Campaign for Migrant Worker Justice, ACLU, ABLE, Jobs with Justice, and the Catholic Diocese of Toledo have launched the first forum, which will take place on June 4, 2009 from 6:00-8:00pm, at the FLOC headquarters, located at 1221 South Broadway Street, Toledo. The question addressed is: “Why do we need immigration reform?”

Supporting this cause is important because we are supporting the dignity and respect of all human beings. Respecting the dignity of other human beings is something that we owe to those who are less fortunate than ourselves.