Abogados de Inmigracion

When I was a youth, Channel 5 used to have a message at 10:00 P.M. In five seconds it would say every night, “Do you know where your children are?” So the excuses have to stop and the Hispanic community has to be educated by all, not just by the government. But if people on both sides in the Capitol compromise and hand the immigrants their version of a three-fifths compromise (see the Constitution) and President Bush achieves his “guest worker program” for immigrants, that program should be supported with funds that will permit all immigrants to obtain a GED.

The immigration movement triumphed in the Senate during the week of March 27, 2006 in getting the Senate to eliminate the threat of making it a felony to help illegal immigrants. With all of the talk about the Catholic Church and community groups, I still do not hear Congressman Peter King talk about the fact that his bill places members of families in danger too. Family members reserve the right to help their family members. In some families people are residents and even citizens and they support illegal residents who came after them. Not since slavery, the holocaust, and the struggle against communism have we seen such harsh thoughts and we have seen them in America, which shows that Peter King and others who support such ideas have not learned from history. They may call themselves leaders, but if we look at the immigration probably deeply, they are bad leaders, leading America to at the least a small depression and increased racism.

I often think about President Franklin D. Roosevelt making the St. Louis, a boat filled with Jews seeking to save their lives, return to Europe where those people were killed in the Holocaust. If we Jews had helped our family members and friends, we would have been criminals under the act proposed by Congressman King. Irish, Poles, Chinese, and others, too, would be considered criminals for helping their people. If only we Jews had known, I told a reporter for Hispano Americana of Long Island in an interview by the Capitol demonstration that our people did not know we could cross the border as Hispanics and others to illegally, we, too, would have helped our people with support. We would have hired coyotes for them and built an “underground railroad” to transport them to safety to our homes.

The failure of the immigration movement in my eyes has been that it has not put the word out to the immigrants about the GED. Each letter, newsletter published could have used my information for Hispanics and other immigrants. Look at what is happening now. In less than ten years, the numbers of youth without a diploma has skyrocketed from 1.5 million to 3.5 million. And as I predicted there has been a great decline on the Spanish GED, going from 37,796 candidates in 2003 to 23,719 in 2004. The people in charge of GED all over the country knew it was coming, because it happened on the English GED in 2002 and they did not learn from history also. New York went down a lot and Texas, Florida, and California went down in testing even much more. All of this hurts the competitiveness and future of the Hispanic community.

I want Mr. Sharry and the Reverend Lawson of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to do much more than they have done. I think they can start immediately. Mr. Lawson can also focus his attention on the millions of African Americans who are often treated like “illegal immigrants” who have not graduated from high school. The Civil Rights Movement never really helped this underclass of poorly educated people.

Photo of Frank Sharry taken outside the Capitol on March 27, 2006 during the rally there. I spoke with Mr. Sharry and told him that I saw him in the Presidential Forum in El Salvador two years ago and I like forward to talking to him about my ideas soon. We have to join to help millions of people now.

MARTIN N. DANENBERG
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ISLANDIA, NY 11749
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