Immigration

Earlier today, fretting under the weight of a report that Senator Ted Kennedy was in a meeting with George W. Bush and Republican lawmakers to discuss immigration reform, Kim Foltz and I departed from our usual workday to join a delegation organized by the Anti-Displacement Project (A-DP, Springfield, MA), the Irish Immigration Center and the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy (MIRA) Coalition (Boston, MA) to visit with the senior senator's staff. There was a single, consistent theme to the meeting: migrants rights are workers rights. Here's a decidedly idiosyncratic account of the action.

Two recent research notes on immigration, one by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the other by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, provide both immigrant advocates and nativists data to support their causes. MGA, decidedly in the former camp, accepts the data adduced but believes that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the social and policy implications issuing from the numbers.