Immigration advocacy goes local

[pampango]

Source: USA Today

As the prospect of Congress passing an overhaul of immigration law wanes, immigration advocacy groups are shifting their sights from the U.S. Capitol and focusing on their local communities. They are forming neighborhood committees to help legal and illegal immigrants navigate deportation proceedings and learn English. They lobby local police and government officials to resist harsh enforcement and warn neighbors of immigration raids.

"The new front of progress is definitely at the local level," says Stephen Fotopulos, executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition. Francisco Pacheco, East Coast coordinator for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, says the local efforts are a way to maintain the cohesion seen during marches against Arizona's immigration law this year and larger protests in 2006.

Bob Dane, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates lower levels of immigration, says people who support tighter immigration controls have also gone local as Congress avoids immigration legislation. "The open-borders groups are now beginning to see that the battle has shifted from (Washington, D.C.) to localities," Dane says.

Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, which advocates lower levels of immigration, says he is troubled by illegal immigrants monitoring police to alert neighbors of their operations. "That really crosses into a whole different type of political activity," Beck says. "It's very counterproductive to the cause of these immigrant groups, because it'll cause them to seem more foreign and less American."

Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-10-11-localimmigration11_ST_N.htm