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ImmigrationProf Blog
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Good Immigration News: Maura Clarke-Ita Ford Center in Brooklyn

By immigrationprof

Img_1359 It often is hard to find good news on immigration in this dismal immigration epoch.  But here is an upbeat story about Ruth Ford’s decision to take over the Maura Clarke-Ita Ford Center in Brooklyn, where immigrant women learn English, finish high school, and develop job skills.  The Center draws several hundred women each year to learn English and other subjects. sponsible for her decision. The Maura Clarke-Ita Ford Center will celebrate its 15th anniversary on May 15, 2008.

The center is named after Ruth Ford’s aunt, Sister Ita C. Ford, and Sister Maura Clarke, two Maryknoll missionaries from New York who were among four North American churchwomen raped, tortured and killed by soldiers in El Salvador on December 1980. The women had worked with the poor in Salvador and, for that reason, were classified as “communists” and enemies of the Salvadoran government. Archbishop Oscar Romero also was killed for his efforts to help the poor.

The Maura Clarke-Ita Ford Center seeks to promote integration of immigrants in U.S. society, which is often ignored as a policy option by restrictionists who decry the alleged failure of immigrants to assimilate and clamor for pie-in-the sky policy options such as mass deportations and closing the borders.

KJ