3 ms·
I was born and raised in Guatemala of U.S. citizen parents and I spend most of my time fighting this broken and violent immigration system through citizenorange
by kyledeb 15y ago
I was born and raised in Guatemala of U.S. citizen parents and I spend most of my time fighting this broken and violent immigration system through citizenorange.com and presente.org. I'm a lurker here on hacker news mostly because technology news is a welcome respite from this mess.
I just wanted to say that I don't blame folks if they decide the U.S. is not the place to be. God knows I hope to be able to do some of my pro-migrant work from Guatemala someday. At the same time I wanted to tell people that there is a way to fight this messed up system which DREAMers (undocumented youth who only know the U.S. as their home) have paved the way for.
It will be a long time before Congress fixes this mostly because debates over the immigration system have nothing to do with rationality, they have mostly to do with the contentious subject of what it means to be an 'American,' where xenophobic ideas certainly play a large role. In the meantime, though, there are administrative things that can be done through Obama administration if you fight hard enough for them and embarass them enough. I'm certain, for example, that this entrepeneur will be fine after this article for instance (he's also lucky he's dealing with USCIS and not ICE).
I'm just writing this all out in case there are folks out there who are willing to give coming here to the U.S. a shot and taking on fixing this broken immigration system in addition to creating companies. If all the good folks leave, this problem will never get fixed. And if it looks like your against the wall, there's a good network of pro-migrant activists like me that will fight for you to resist and stay.