Political Impact
It's great that you are taking some political action to get something
done, but I feel that this effort may be misguided. Let take a moment
and consider what everyone's interests are.
Politicians are motivated to stay in power. This is accomplished by 2
main drivers:
1) Votes
2) Money to fund campaigns to get those votes
Clearly, we immigrants do not have any impact with votes, since we
have no voting power.
We do pay taxes, but this does not directly help the politician that
wants to stay in power.
Unless we have some very wealthy immigrants willing to make large
contributions to influential politicians, I don't think that we can do
much. There is the option to pool some money together and hire a
political lobbying firm for us - This requires great organization and
many demands of time and money for us.
The other route is to convince voting Americans that our plight
deserves more attention. Unfortunately, as many of you know, this is
a major uphill battle. Americans have always been a little
xenophobic, and with the economy taking a beating in the last 3 years,
Americans don't want to hear about how immigrants WITH JOBS want to
stay in America permanantly. Yes, yes, we all know that immigration is
good in the long run and we can preach all day about the economics of
it all, but this does not work to convince the average joe American.
Again, we could pool resources together to hire a PR firm
that would run commercials and tap the media to tell our story,
but again, this seems very time and money intensive.
One more possibly effective alternative is to convince your employer
to lobby on your behalf. Clearly, they have an interest in keeping
you here otherwise you would not have been hired.
Please consider these thoughts. I welcome your comments and feedback.
I am a WAC-02-186, so I have a loooooooong wait ahead.
It's great that you are taking some political action to get something
done, but I feel that this effort may be misguided. Let take a moment
and consider what everyone's interests are.
Politicians are motivated to stay in power. This is accomplished by 2
main drivers:
1) Votes
2) Money to fund campaigns to get those votes
Clearly, we immigrants do not have any impact with votes, since we
have no voting power.
We do pay taxes, but this does not directly help the politician that
wants to stay in power.
Unless we have some very wealthy immigrants willing to make large
contributions to influential politicians, I don't think that we can do
much. There is the option to pool some money together and hire a
political lobbying firm for us - This requires great organization and
many demands of time and money for us.
The other route is to convince voting Americans that our plight
deserves more attention. Unfortunately, as many of you know, this is
a major uphill battle. Americans have always been a little
xenophobic, and with the economy taking a beating in the last 3 years,
Americans don't want to hear about how immigrants WITH JOBS want to
stay in America permanantly. Yes, yes, we all know that immigration is
good in the long run and we can preach all day about the economics of
it all, but this does not work to convince the average joe American.
Again, we could pool resources together to hire a PR firm
that would run commercials and tap the media to tell our story,
but again, this seems very time and money intensive.
One more possibly effective alternative is to convince your employer
to lobby on your behalf. Clearly, they have an interest in keeping
you here otherwise you would not have been hired.
Please consider these thoughts. I welcome your comments and feedback.
I am a WAC-02-186, so I have a loooooooong wait ahead.