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Press release: Southern Poverty Law Center to Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota: Community is most important word
Posted on Oct 13 2017
October 13, 2017 – ” The most important word here tonight is community,” Joseph Levin, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), told hundreds of supporters of the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota (ILCM). “Welcome immigrants – documented, undocumented – into the community. These are really strong people. That’s how they got here, how most of our ancestors got here. … Support from the community is the most critical thing that any of us can do.”
Speaking at an October 12 benefit for ILCM, Levin recounted his early days growing up in segregated Alabama. He was a Jew and Morris Dees, who later co-founded SPLC with him, was a Baptist. Despite this major difference, they had more in common: “We were both white, went to the same all-white high school, the same all-white university, the same all-white law school.” Back then, Levin said, “Every white person I knew was a racist. So was I.” Change came slowly and gradually to him, as the civil rights movement changed the country.
Now he sees the country going backwards, with “invigoration of extremists and extremist groups from the Klan and neo-Nazis to radical anti-immigrant groups,” and with “overt bigotry … justified by our president, his vice president, and their various surrogates.”
“What country is this?” Levin asked. “I thought the stories of bigotry and hate were relegated to the fringes of our society. I was wrong. I see, smell, and feel the 1950s and 1960s again.”
Ibrahim Hirsi of MinnPost moderated a panel discussion following Levin’s keynote, with Senator Patricia Torres-Ray; Maya Salah, an attorney with Lindquist & Vennum and ILCM board member; and ILCM Executive Director John Keller.
Torres-Ray described the impact of current anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric on families, with undocumented parents living in fear and worrying about how to plan for their U.S. citizen children’s futures. She described isolation as another consequence of today’s anti-immigrant policies, with people uncertain about whether they can trust their neighbor, teacher, doctor or church.
Asked for a hopeful message, attorney Maya Salah held up a small booklet. “This is our hope,” she said. “I love the constitution. It is one of the reasons I went to law school. … That’s where the hope is for me. That ultimately we can use the law to get to where we want to get to as a nation.”
Another reason for hope, said John Keller, is that the overwhelming majority of people in the country support the Dream Act. Five major networks, including Fox, polled people on whether they support a path to citizenship for those who entered as children. “Every one of the networks was in 80 percent support level, including Fox,” he said.
The Dream Act, Keller concluded, “is the gateway to deeper systems change in the face of people who don’t want it to happen.”
Keller thanked the people who support ILCM, both those at the benefit and those who could not be there. He listed concrete steps to take in support of immigrants:
- Talk to people you disagree with – civilly.
- Ask people who live in Minnesota Representative Tom Emmer, Jason Lewis, and Erik Paulsen’s districts to call their representative every single day. First on the Dream Act and then on immigrant justice. “I am convinced that Minnesota will be the state in the Midwest where we have unanimous, bipartisan Congressional support for the Dream Act.”
- Ask businesses and organizations to publicly support the Dream Act and immigrant justice. Go to FWD.us and see the list of more than 800 corporations, which includes Minnesota-based Best Buy, General Mills, Target, and the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce.
- Donate and volunteer for an organization that supports immigrants and refugees.
Finally, Keller said, “We don’t have the luxury of fatigue. We cannot be overwhelmed by the snowstorm of hate, of anti-immigrant, of anti-everything. We are the ones who have to be strong and not give up.”