Tag Archives: immigration

By Ramona Houston, Ph.D., National Center for Civil and Human Rights This 2014, each of the participating sites in the National Dialogues on Immigration project will be contributing to our blog post series, “Immigration: Our Stories.”  Immigration has become a contentious issue among people and communities across the United States. The increased fear of new arrivals to America has caused a rise in xenophobia as well as a rise in tensions among diverse groups, especially since the immigration debate also has racial …
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By Erica Garcia, Curriculum and Community Coordinator, National Hispanic Cultural Center This 2014, each of the participating sites in the National Dialogues on Immigration project will be contributing to our blog post series, “Immigration: Our Stories.”  As a young girl, I was aware that generations of my family were from New Mexico dating back hundreds of years. Our family takes great pride in being Nuevo Mexicanos. By middle school, I started questioning that strong sense of identity when I noticed my Grandmother …
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by Jennifer Scott A quieter trend of immigration in the United States includes rapidly growing black immigrant community. A recent article, The Changing Face of Citizenship, asserts that since 2000, black citizenship in Massachusetts has more than doubled, “fueled by transplants from the Caribbean and, increasingly, fast-growing groups from Africa. Nationwide, the number of new black citizens has nearly doubled, to 1.8 million.”  Nationally, in fact, according to the Population Reference Bureau, the number of the black foreign-born population increased …
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by Jennifer Scott “Home is whenever I’m with you” from “Home,” a song from Jorge Narvaez to his mother In tribute to Mother’s Day, this piece is dedicated to all of the mothers who are affected by immigration policies. The recent spike in deportations – two million since 2009 – has greatly impacted families, often separating parents from children and siblings from one another, breaking up marriages and extended families. No one has felt this pain more than the mothers. …
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This 2014, each of the participating sites in the National Dialogues on Immigration project will be contributing to our blog post series, “Immigration: Our Stories.” This post comes from Levine Museum of the New South. A few Charlotteans were asked: What is your definition of “immigrant”? “Someone who has moved to a different place in hopes of a better future & life.” “Someone who doesn’t have papers. They’re illegal.” “Someone who takes our jobs.” Immigrant. When people hear or see …
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This week, at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, a team of multimedia artists who are part of a new project called Immigrant Nation will be working with visitors to record their stories and add them to an installation art piece at Ellis Island. “Whether you arrived just recently or your family came to the U.S. generations ago, the millions of immigrants and descendants of immigrants who make up our nation have something important in common,” said Immigrant Nation …
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by Peter Wong, Park Ranger, Ellis Island Immigration Museum Mainstream American society considers me affectionately as an “ABC,” or “American-born Chinese.” Native-born Chinese, meanwhile, refer to me as a “juk sing,” or “hollowed bamboo” — a derisive term indicating that while I may look outwardly Chinese, I lack the language or cultural insights to be accepted into Chinese society. To be fair, I cannot read or write Chinese, and I speak the Chinese dialect of Cantonese like a precocious nine-year-old. …
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In the StoryCorps series aired weekly on NPR, see this short video clip, “By the time I was in the second grade, everyone was calling me Raymond,” where Ramon “Chunky” Sanchez recounts how teachers changed the names of Mexican-American students during the 1950s.  Here’s the audio link NPR is also running a special series, Borderland- dispatches from the US-Mexico boundary. This week’s story is, Crossing The Desert: Why Brenda Wanted Border Patrol To Find Her, about a woman who becomes separated from her …
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This 2014, each of the participating sites in the National Dialogues on Immigration project will be contributing to our blog post series, “Immigration: Our Stories.” This post comes from Irina Zadov of Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. -Milan Kundera For the last three years, the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum has been facilitating dialogues which connect histories of migrant and immigrant experience at the turn of the twentieth century to contemporary …
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What’s making news in immigration this week… At this week’s SXSW (South by Southwest) –  the annual music, film, and interactive conference and festival held in Austin, Texas (March 7-15) – actress Rosario Dawson weighed in on immigration and immigration reform: Post by FWD.us.   FWD.US  created an initiative and hashtag, America is #BuiltByImmigrants. #BuiltByImmigrants features stories by immigrants who have made a difference in America, whether through starting companies, or contributing significantly in an industry. The goal of Built By …
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