From a description of the purpose of the Dialogues last fall:
Dialogues for Immigrant Integration is funded by The Colorado Trust and is part of an ongoing 15-community initiative within the state. In Boulder County, the 20-member steering committee includes the components of the Boulder County Immigrant Collaborative (El Comité of Longmont, El Centro Amistad, and Boulder County Community Action Programs) as well as the cities of Boulder, Longmont, and Lafayette, the St. Vrain and Boulder Valley School districts, and an eclectic mixture of other non-profit organizations, local businesses, and individuals. According to Leslie Irwin, the committee is very active and extremely involved in the initiative because all members believe that it is a necessary and valuable project that will give dividends over its four-year funding period.
Read more in the Colorado Daily.
Forget the war, health care funding or global warming. At least we're arguing about the details and solutions to those things. Immigration is the elephant in the room that has either apathy or demagoguery as its impact. Perhaps because the economic underpinnings of the issues immigration raises are so sweeping, so deeply a part of our preferred quality of life that just considering the issue is too painful, hence total emotional meltdowns or contrived indifference.
11 comments:
Tom Tancredo and Dave Schultheis thank you for stirring the pot again. We wouldn't be successful politicians without this issue. We love "dialogue."
I went over to Pioneer Elementary Saturday a.m. to find the doors locked and no signage outside. So all I could surmise was that it was cancelled or I was in the wrong location.
Immigration is being talked about a lot. So if one thinks it is not, one is not paying attention. The Denver Post ran two stories front page in the last few days. One was about the decimation of the Aurora Public School System and the efforts to recover. The second was about the use of illegal immigrants by the Mexican drug cartels to run drugs into the U.S. Last week there was an editorial in the Rocky about the failure of the country's school system to teach reading to kids with Hispanics faring far worse than other ethnic groups. Another recent article was about the failed attempt in the state legislature to require high school graduates to speak and read English.
Today Mark Udall was being queried on KHOW about the proposed immigration law before Congress. Turns out he hadn't read it yet. Mike Coffman, Secretary of State, was on opposing a law on the table of the governor that make it easy for anyone using forged documents to acquire a state drivers license. The state's Attorney General is also opposing it.
So anonymous, the pot is being stirred big time now as the country wrestles with the illegal immigration problem. The big question is how?
Hey, thanks also for giving us credit for talking about a solution to the war. We're real problem solvers in Congress, not just a bunch of special interest-driven robots exploiting a lame duck President and seeking political advantage in international disaster. Thank you, America. Mission accomplished!
Is Lafayette going to vote on becoming a "sanctuary city"? I read something about this in the Daily Camera.
d-b,
No. It probably is already in a defacto way but not an officially sanction way. (Oops, I can imagine the pushback on this comment.)
The council has been asked by the Latino Advisory Board and Project Yes to support a resolution suspending all Federal immigration raids until new Federal legislation can be passed. According to the Police Chief, there has never been an ICE raid in Lafayette. I suspect Dan et al will open up a dialogue on this.
How quickly that Board has morphed into a political action committee. I don't know if it has posted its minutes recording their vote as of yet. Also somehow their preliminary recommendations they presented to the council during a workshop seems to have been superceded by this resoluton request.
A new study by Indiana University media researchers finds that Fox News host Bill O’Reilly calls "a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute during the editorials that open his program each night.
Sound familiar?
Yep, Bill's a jerk... What is your comment referring to?
Sound familiar? No. We need an moratorium on federal law enforcement to protect us from ourselves being tempted to watch Bill O'Reilly?
Sound familiar? No. I don't waste time watching Fox News.
If this resolution passed, would Lafayette have the authority to stop an ICE raid? I don't know if a city has the power to stop a federal government action.
Lafayette cannot interfere with an ICE raid nor is it being asked to do so through this resolution. I will skip the Whereas and get to the Resolved language, "that the City of Lafayette does not welcome raids of its immigrant communities because of the deep, intense and constant fear it engenders in the immigrant community regardless of legal status; and that the City of Lafayette and its citizens encourage a moratorium on federal immigration raids until fair and humane immigration reform is passed in Washington..." Now as a practice council has avoided getting involved in issues that are more appropriately handled at the state and national level. My concern is not with the language of this resolution, but what that opens the door for down the road. Lafayette is not Boulder (by choice) and a lightning rod for the far left. However as officials elected at large we need to represent the opinion of our community. So I will be soliciting as much opinion as I can get on this subject to get an idea of where the whole community stands.
Thanks for the information Frank and good luck with this no-win issue.
Post a Comment