Michigan voters support hope with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to protect democracy

Echo opinion letter published in The Oakland Press a Michigan newspaper:

I’ve never been so fired 😊up about a Presidential and Vice-Presidents- the likes of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. #VoteHarrisWalz2024

I had the opportunity (Aug. 7) to attend the Harris/Walz rally along with 18,000 other individuals in an airhanger overlooking Detroit Metro Airport’s McNamara Terminal. The sun was beating down but the slight breeze ushered in winds of change. This rally was the cherry on top of 2 weeks of advocacy – coming home from long days at work in the automotive industry only to join 2-3 hour Zoom calls with my husband after the kids went to bed – including White Women for Harris, Veteran Families for Harris, and White Dudes for Harris – which collectively raked in over 💲4 Million dollars into the estimated over 💲300 Million they’ve brought into the campaign since Joe Biden announced he was stepping aside to let Kamala Harris shine.

Governor Tim Walz and Vice-Presidential candidate attending the Michigan vs Minnesota football game on Septpember 28, 2024

We stood shoulder to shoulder for hours and listened to almost every significant Democratic leader from the State of Michigan speak at the rally, including Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, House of Representatives Hillary Scholten, Debbie Dingle, Elissa Slotkin, Shri Thanedar, and Haley Stevens, Senator Debbie Stabenow, and Governor (Big) Gretchen Whitmer. Their messages were peppered with inspirational one liners, humor, some cuss words (Gretch), but overall message of unity. They highlighted their misalignment with the opposition with facts on policy and change instead of hate and derision – even when small groups tried to gain momentum with chants of “Lock Him Up” they quickly waned in favor of “VOTE!”

Most of us stood there for hours, tirelessly shifting in our place amongst fellow like minded thinkers waiting for a glimpse of history in the making. Then Tim Walz took the stage to much fanfare as America’s Dad. A man who’s evolution from farmer to Governor is what the American Dream is made of. As a former Republican myself, he is the moderate we’ve been searching for – military background and pro-Gun (with smart gun laws) – he used his state’s surplus of tax revenue to invest in education and free breakfast and lunches for all school age children. He’s a candidate whose policies we could (and should) all get behind. He’s an example of not only how we can do better but we can be better. And he’s pivoted the narrative of the traditional Democratic ticket.

We all sat eagerly holding onto every word of their message. At the end of the day I came home with layers of sweat, a bad back, sore feet but a full heart and a feeling of optimism for America’s future. I’ll tell my kids about this experience as it was one for the books as we continue to fight for our democracy, for our voice, for our votes. As we came back into the bright sunshine of the tarmac at the end of the rally, we were bid farewell by the sun setting behind Air Force Two, a physical symbol of democracy.

From Theresa Osbourn, in Rochester Hills, in Michigan

Immigration is esssential to America's exceptionalism

Echo EDITORIAL published in the The Boston Sun

MaineWriter note:  Eight of the signers of the American Declaration of Independence were born in Britain.  They were obviously immigrants.

Immigrants Are Our Future - MaineWriter:  America and the "American Dream", a vision of our nation where economic opportunities are available to all, are not sustainable, unless we are open and welcoming to immigrants. 

by The Boston Sun Staff

It is an undeniable fact of history that all Americans other than Native Americans are descendants of immigrants.

It also is undeniably true that immigrants have not always been welcome with open arms, starting most conspicuously with the Know-Nothing Party of the 1840s-50s, which rose to some degree of political prominence solely based on its opposition to immigration, specifically Catholics and Irish.

On the other hand, Americans have at times been more than willing to accept immigrants. Here is a news item from one of our newspapers, the Winthrop Sun-Transcript, that appeared in January of 1949:

“Four Latvian refugees, including Capt. Rosenberg and his wife, who were among the 29 refugees who landed in Boston aboard a 65-foot ketch in July, will open the Home Pastry Shop in the Centre, formerly Eliot and Taylor’s Bread and Pie Shop. The group has received the financial backing of kindhearted people in the area.”

What also is true is that immigrants have contributed mightily to making America arguably the greatest and most powerful nation on earth, from the days of our founding to the present time.
From Alexander Hamilton, who was a native of the island of Nevis in the Caribbean; to Enrico Fermi (Italian-born), Edwin Teller (Hungarian-born), and Robert Oppenheimer (a son of immigrants), who developed the atomic bomb; to Steve Jobs (whose father was an immigrant from Syria); to the founders of Google (whose parents are Russian), it has been immigrants who have contributed greatly to both the reality and promise of American exceptionalism.

It also is undeniably true that declining birth rates in America today will mean that there will be fewer young people to pay for, and take care of, our rapidly-aging population.

To those who seek to impose strict quotas on immigration, perhaps they should think of immigration this way: If you are building a successful sports team, you need to have the best and hardest-working players — and in the case of global competition, that means we need to be open to receiving people from around the world. Immigrants always have led the way in taking America to the next level.

In our view, our nation will thrive in the 21st century only if we remain committed to attracting the world’s most industrious minds.

Echo from the Texas border that Mexico was going to pay for: Another local voice

Immigration reform will work better than a border wall: An echo opinion letter published in the Texas, El Paso Times.

This photograph and hundreds like it are the evil legacy of Donald Trump's border wall that "Mexico would pay for".  He said to his cult followers, "Who will pay for the wall?  Who?" Putting people in cages is a humanitarian degradation attributed to the Trumpzi cultists and their unfounded hysteria about how innocent immigrants are somehow capable of bringing crime into the US.  Mexico will never pay for an evil wall but Donald Trump has created heinous human cages, instead.  

Over the past 10 years, violent crime rates have not changed in El Paso because of the border wall; however, other minor crimes have decreased thanks to task forces initiated by the El Paso Police Department. Since 2000, undocumented immigration has decreased by 20 percent while the vast majority of drugs entering this country has been through ports of entry. 

Building a wall won’t stop individuals from trying to cross undocumented, won’t deter crime from happening on the Mexican side of the border, and won’t stop drugs from entering our country.

Rather than addressing the root cause of our problems, Donald Trump’s turned to declaring a national emergency to build a wall that he hopes will stop undocumented immigrants and drugs from entering our country. Trump’s wall will not prove to be successful; therefore, I believe a more successful approach is reforming our existing immigration policies and increasing the number of officers at our ports of entry to stop drugs from entering. 

If we spent the billions of dollars for the proposed wall on revising our immigration policies and adding more technology and agents at our ports of entry then we might see a decrease in our country’s opioid and drug epidemic as well as undocumented immigrants who risk their lives to live the “American Dream.”

Sylvia Garcia  

Anthony, Texas

American immigrants are USA - contribute to the economy

Immigration is an economic driver, not a drain on the economy: Most of us need not look farther than our own families

More than 800,000 Dreamers (those who qualify as DACA immigrants) are young immigrants with degrees or who are in school, were brought to the U.S. as children. Their circumstances have grown more complicated over the past few weeks by President Donald Trump’s calls to drastically alter U.S. immigration policy. 

Having already reduced the number of refugees resettled by the U.S. to the lowest levels since presidents were given the authority to set the annual number in The Refugee Act of 1980, Trump has called for vast changes to America’s family reunification policies (or “chain migration” as the President likes to call it), as well as the diversity lottery program.

President Trump and other critics of U.S. policy argue that while the intentions of family reunification and diversity lottery programs may be admirable and just, America can’t afford them. 

But the opposite is true. America is the richest, most prosperous and most powerful nation on earth because it embraces freedom and opportunity and is a beacon of hope across the globe.

A few months ago the Department of Health and Human Services, in response to a March 6, 2017 memorandum from Trump asking the federal government to estimate the long-term costs of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, concluded that from 2005-2014, refugees brought in $63 billion more revenue to federal, state, and local governments than they cost. 

Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, was brought to the U.S. as a refugee for humanitarian reasons, and went on to help create one of the world’s most important companies. 

Research by the New American Economy finds that refugee families pay more in taxes than they cost within eight years of arriving. Their incomes grow rapidly as they integrate — tripling within the first 25 years. In fact, refugee household earnings are on par with average Americans ($54,164 per year) within about 15 years after their arrival and reach an average of $67,000 per year, surpassing average American household incomes by more than 20%, 25 years after arrival.

Global Detroit released a report last October, with the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy, that conservatively estimates total annual economic impact of refugee resettlement in Metro Detroit to be between $229.6 million and $295.3 million in new spending. An additional 1,798 to 2,311 new jobs can be attributed, in 2016 alone, to the economic activity stemming from the more than 21,000 refugees in resettled into Macomb, Oakland, Washtenaw and Wayne Counties between 2007-2016. Cities like Southfield — which resettled 4,500 refugees over the last decade —experienced significant economic growth, while violent crime fell 77.1% during this period.

Family reunification and the diversity lottery are critical drivers of our economic growth. Recent research by the Cato Institute — usually the antithesis of bleeding-heart liberalism — notes that family reunification and diversity lottery migrants to the U.S. “are generally much better educated than U.S.-born Americans,” noting that “Diversity and family-sponsored immigrants were 62% more likely than U.S.-born natives to have graduated college.” 

Moreover, the Cato Institute research estimates that 47% of such arrivals in 2015 held a four-year college degree, compared to 29% of the U.S.-born population across the country and approximately 24% of the U.S.-born population living in Michigan.7

The Cato Institute research documents that diversity and family reunification programs provided 2.5 times the number of new immigrants with a college degree arriving in 2015 than all the work-based visas that year.8

Family reunification policies help U.S. citizens and permanent residents to bring their families together to share in the pursuit of the American Dream. Recipients of family reunification visas, “tend to have larger support networks and advantages – social capital – that facilitate their labor market incorporation and provide other benefits for integration,” as noted by 2015 roundtable held at Georgetown University.

Most of us need not look farther than our own families’ ”chain migration” stories to see this point. My paternal grandfather Morris Tobocman worked with his brother Jacob Tobocman to start a business. My maternal grandfather, Wilfred Williams, relied on his siblings to help send him to the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering, and paused his own studies at one point, to provide financial support Jacob Tobocman to send his brother Herman to college. Both went on to become successful entrepreneurs in manufacturing, creating companies that employed hundreds.

The diversity lottery helps America build strong human bonds with countries across the globe, fostering a strong web of transnational ties that support American ideals and foreign policy objectives. The program requires applicants to possess at least a high school diploma and includes an expensive application fee that often restricts access to the most productive and affluent.

The notion that America’s immigration policies — including its refugee, family reunification, and diversity visa — need to be overhauled because we can’t afford them is ludicrous. These programs are foundational to the American Dream. Freedom is a core principle driving our economy. And no country has done a better job of imbuing freedom into its economy than America.

Let’s not allow political rhetoric to destroy that legacy.

Steve Tobocman is executive director of Global Detroit.