Weekend Reading: Highlights from this week’s immigration news (Feb 13-Feb 19)
New York becomes the first city in the country to launch a program (NYT) that will offer foreign-born entrepreneurs a cap-exempt H1-B visa, in exchange for their collaboration with professors and students on City University of New York campuses. Americans have been increasingly concerned about immigration in the past two… Read More
Pastor Advocates for Immigration Reform and Asks His Flock: What Does it Mean to Walk in the Shoes of Someone Else?
Rich Nathan, senior pastor of the Vineyard Church — the largest church in Columbus — empathizes with immigrants in this country; like them, he knows what it’s like to feel out of place. He grew up in a Jewish home in Queens and attended religious schools, but he always felt… Read More
South Carolina Primary: Immigrants in the Palmetto State
This Saturday, Republicans in South Carolina will head to the polls to cast their primary votes. The Palmetto State is home to a small, but rapidly growing, foreign-born population. Although just 4.8 percent of the state’s population is foreign-born, this group grew by over 90 percent between 2000 and 2013. Read More
Failure to Enact Immigration Reform Puts American Food Supply at Risk Says Former USApple Chair
Bill Dodd, a Republican and leader in Ohio’s apple farming community, is an expert in the apple business. A fourth-generation farmer, he lives on the same 85-acre farm that his great-grandfather bought more than half a century ago. As a farmer and an advocate for farmers, Dodd has watched America’s… Read More
Did You Know That Our Founding Fathers Were All Immigrants?
The hit musical Hamilton explains why. There are plenty of verbal acrobatics in Hamilton, the smash-hit hip-hop musical about the life of America’s first Treasury Secretary, but one simple statement has become a kind of battle cry: “Immigrants, we get the job done!” Sung by Nevis-born Alexander Hamilton and… Read More
Lunar New Year in America and the Growth of the Asian-American Population
Monday, February 8, marked the first day of the Lunar New Year, which is celebrated across East Asia and in Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese communities all over the world as the Spring Festival, Seollal, or T?t. Since the earliest days of Chinese immigration in the 1800s, the Lunar New Year… Read More
Dayton City Commissioner Says Immigrant Friendly Initiatives are Revitalizing the Local Economy
Matt Joseph would not be serving his fourth term as the city commissioner of Dayton, Ohio if many decades ago his grandmother had not made a particular demand. She told her boyfriend—Matt’s future grandfather—that she would marry only if he agreed to leave their native Lebanon for America. Read More
How Tech Startup Founders Are Hacking Immigration
Standing under fluorescent lights at a San Francisco hospital, employees of Medisas Inc. were celebrating the debut of their medical records software. It was the product of two years of planning, coding, and countless meetings with hospital administrators, all driven by Gautam Sivakumar, the startup’s founder and chief executive officer. But Sivakumar spent… Read More
Protecting American Bridges, but Still Under Threat of Leaving the Country Due to U.S. Immigration Policy
Born and raised in Venezuela, Andrea Sanchez spent her childhood accompanying her dad, an engineer and university professor, to the lab. Years later, eager to pursue the same career, she entered a doctorate program at the University of South Florida. Studying in the United States was her top choice; Andrea… Read More
‘Biliteracy’ Seal on Student Diplomas Will Recognize and Reward Bilingualism
Ability to speak two languages called important advantage for NJ students as they enter workforce and college New Jersey has joined more than a dozen other states that endorse an official seal on high school graduates’ diplomas and other records that signifies they are proficient in a second language. Known… Read More
All gifts are matched dollar for dollar
No one should face the immigration system alone
