Gay Latinos Humanizing Immigration Debate

From Project Economic REfugee:

In the midst of the national push to get Congress to vote on the DREAM Act (it has now been tentatively scheduled to be voted on November 29th in the House of Representatives and Senator Reid has said that he will bring it up for a Senate vote on as a stand-alone bill), Project Economic Refugee has been drawing parallels from the coincedental intersection in time between the DREAM Act and the other major piece of legislation that many progressive activists are trying to push: the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Most specifically, Project Economic Refugee has been arguing for mutual empathy for the purpose of promoting the idea that we have much work to do to instill a sense of compassion and respect for “the other” in both the Latino communities and in the gay community, with a special focus on the call to foster stronger support for a humane comprehensive immigration reform among the LGBTQ community.

As the vote for both Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the DREAM Act loom closer, it has been fascinating to see the underlying similarities between the experience of being gay and the experience of being an undocumented youth in America. Just this week, we had a couple of cases, in Fresno State and in Miami Dade College’s InterAmerican campus, that received major national attention because of college students being “outed” or “coming out” as undocumented (or as the media derisively called them, “illegal immigrants”) and subsequently finding themselves stigmatized by the larger society even though that by growing up their entire lives in this country and for all intents and purposes, these young students are as American as any other U.S. citizen. Read more…

bh