Immigrants Rights and Social Justice

I gave a speech titled "Telling our Story," the day after President Obama's inauguration at the Worcester City Hall. Below is the video followed by the full text.





TELLING OUR STORY

I was born and raised in a country called Kenya. A country known for producing excellent long distance runners and very recently, a country proud to have provided genetic material for the new US president. Yesterday, the first black president was inaugurated. The day before, we honored a man who marched to make that dream possible.

A poet from Brooklyn summed up the historical journey of the black civil rights movement by saying quote, “Rosa Parks sat so that Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so that Barack Obama could run. And Barack Obama ran, so that our children could fly. I don’t know if Barack Obama, by virtue of having Kenyan blood in him, had any other choice but to run. But I know this, I know that I want my 6 months old daughter to one day fly.

America has undoubtedly made strides towards ensuring racial equality and civil rights for all her citizens. But speaking to you as an immigrant from an African country, I can tell you that much more remains to be done in order to make America see the need to treat immigrant workers with respect and dignity.

Those of us who labor day and day out, night in and night out, taking care of their sick and elderly in nursing homes, in fast food restaurant and convenient stores, in factories, in vegetable and fruit farms in Santa Maria Valley in California…we have had enough of negative rhetoric about immigrants stealing American jobs, crowding hospitals and schools, increasing crime rates in cities, bringing strange diseases to the shores of America….we have had enough of those xenophobic lies from the Oreillys and Lou Dobbs of America…

Now it is time for us to tell our story. It is time for us to tell them how immigration has always been part of the American fabric. How immigration benefits the economy. It is time for us to tell them as Professor Alan Krueger, a professor of economics at Princeton University found out that there is no evidence from past immigration patters to suggest that immigrants take jobs away from.

Let the people know that unlike what they hear on FOX NEWS and talk radios, immigrants do not lower the wages of American born workers but rather, as shown by a study done in 2005 by the National Bureau of Economic Research, immigrants actually raised the average wage of the American worker by 1.1% during the 1990s.

Speak up be heard. Tell them that no human being is illegal. Tell them we do not come here so that we can take advantage of free government services, tell them a woman does not risk her life crossing the Rio Grande or the desert of Arizona hoping for a piece of free government cheese..

If we wanted a piece of anything, it would be a piece of the American dream. Tell them we do not come here for free stuff, we come here to work. In fact the so called illegal immigrants are the only people who pay taxes in but never collect their benefits later. About $600 billion dollars (enough to bail out a few banks) $600 billion dollars of unclaimed benefits are being held by the Social Security Administration in what they call the Earning Suspense File.

If we were to ask for anything, in exchange for the $600 billion dollars, aside from the silence of Hannity, Lou Dobbs and O’Reilly, it would be for the hard working, descent immigrant to be treated with dignity and respect and for America to acknowledge the crucial role he played by the immigrant in propping up the economy and in the enriching the culture.

The problem is not people refusing to “wait in line” for their turn to be welcomed in America. The problem is that there is no line. The problem is not how many people are coming to America today. The problem is who is coming to America today. For instance by 1920, nearly 72% of all Worcester residents were either foreign born or had foreign parents. 72%. What about today? Only 14.5% of the population of Worcester is foreign born.

Yet the anti-immigration noise has never been louder. That is why we must insist on being heard. We must insist on the truth about who we are and why we are here. We must insist on letting America know the value of not just immigrant labor but also the diversity of cultures in an increasingly global world. There cannot be a global economy without free movement of labor. The debate thus far has been one sided. Our voice has not been heard. We must insist on telling our story.