Possible statement you could use -

“As a United Methodist, I urge Senator  to SUPPORT Senator Hirono’s Amendment #10, and all Hirono and Blumenthal amendments to improve family unity and make the pathway to citizenship more accessible. I also urge Senator  to OPPOSE amendments offered by Senators Grassley and Sessions that would narrow or delay the pathway to citizenship.”

SUPPORT AMENDMENTS TO IMPROVE FAMILY UNITY & PATHWAY TO CITIZENSHIP

ALL HIRONO AMENDMENTS, ESPECIALLY HIRONO #10

Hirono #5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13 would allow U.S. citizens to continue sponsoring their siblings and married children over 31, raise the cut-off date for married kids to 39 instead of 31, and improve the likelihood for these family members to be reunited, especially when their U.S. citizen family member has not used the family visa system before or would experience hardship.

Hirono #12, 14, 16, 17 would allow individuals to pay fines in installments, allow individuals with registered provisional immigrant (RPI) status to sponsor their spouse and children outside of the U.S., provide access to health care for individuals with RPI status, children and pregnant women, and allow states to provide health care to DREAMers, agricultural workers, and some individuals with RPI status.

March 8, 2013, 5:30 PM PDT — Bishop Minerva Carcaño and other faith leaders met privately with President Obama today at the White House to discuss immigration reform.

“We started off the meeting praying for the president and for immigrants, and when we were finished, he (Obama) asked us if there would be another prayer. We offered up another prayer seeking wisdom for both the president and members of Congress,” Bishop Minerva Carcaño told the press. The bishop attended the meeting with fourteen others, including Jim Wallis of Sojourners, Archbishop José Horacio Gomez of the Los Angeles Archdiocese, and Mark Hetfield, President and CEO, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

“During the meeting, the president emphasized that comprehensive immigration reform was a high priority for him, and he asked us as faith leaders to continue to push for it,” she also told United Methodist News Service.

“It was so wonderful to hear him say this was high priority for him and that he believes this is the season for immigration reform,” she said.

For extended coverage of today’s meeting from national and religious news outlets, please see the following links (they will open in your browser):

• Methodist Bishop Minerva Carcaño on front lines of immigration battle (Washington Post)
• Methodist Bishop Minerva Carcaño on front lines of immigration battle (Religious News Service - includes links to other, older resources)
• Obama asks prayers for immigration reform (Global Post)
• President Invites bishop to immigration meeting (United Methodist News Service)
• Readout of the president’s meeting on commonsense immigration reform (White House press release)

Immigration Reform 2013

United Methodist Women national office welcomes the momentum for national immigration reform this year!  This is the moment we have been waiting for and as women of faith committed to justice, particularly for women, youth and children, we must seize this moment!  As a contribution, United Methodist Women offers core principles to guide us in the intense national debate and negotiations ahead.

On Monday, January 28 four Republican and four Democratic Senators (known as the “Gang of 8”) launched a Bipartisan Framework on Comprehensive Immigration Reform [http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/politics/bipartisan-framework-for-immigration-reform-report/27/]. On Tuesday in Las Vegas, President Obama presented a White House roadmap for immigration reform  [http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/01/29/fact-sheet-fixing-our-broken-immigration-system-so-everyone-plays-rules].  Both the Senate and White House are committed to immigration reform this year, perhaps as early as June.

UMW/UMC Working for Immigrant Rights

United Methodist Women has been engaged in an Immigrant & Civil Rights Initiative since  2006, building on our long tradition of welcoming immigrants that dates back to the 19th Century.  In 2012 we engaged in a spiritual growth study, “Immigration & the Bible,” by the Rev. Joan Marushkin.  There, we explored how the entire Biblical story is one of migration—due to famine, war, family conflict, women’s oppression, religious commitment and more.  And we learned of the deep Biblical mandate to welcome the migrant and to love one another as God has loved us.
We feel that as Christians it is important to enter from the place of our biblical and moral commitment first.  What is our vision of the “kin-dom” or what Dr. Martin Luther King called the “beloved community,” and how can we encourage our elected leaders to move closer to that ideal?

United Methodist Women joins the United Methodist Task Force on Immigration and the General Board of Church & Society in welcoming the momentum for reform and saluting the White House and Congress for putting immigration reform high on the agenda this year.  We echo the core concerns of the United Methodist Church:  a real and reasonable pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants; reunification of families; and labor rights for both immigrant and citizen workers.

What Kind of Reform We Want to See

We begin the national immigration reform debate with a set of values and principles on what just immigration reform would really look like if we could attain it.  The complexity of the coming debate will be in the details and in the political trade-offs that will be made to get a bill passed.   We will join with the faith community and with allies in women’s, immigrant rights, civil rights and labor organizations to fight hard for the best immigration reform deal.  We do not have illusions that our vision is around the corner—it is a long way off.  Any legislation in 2013 will become the basis for new rounds of advocacy for fair and just immigration laws and policies.

In the UMW core principles for immigration reform [http://immigration.umwonline.net/general/immigrationpolicy/united-methodist-women-core-principles-for-u.s.-immigration-reform-2013] we outline how we should negotiate and build coalitions (without pitting one group of immigrants against another) and basic principles, and then offer details regarding what we want to see included and excluded in a reform bill.  The broad principles include:

•    Human rights and security of individuals and communities must come first.
•    Families must remain united and not be torn apart.
•    Equality and due process before the law must be respected for all.
•    The specific realities of immigrant women, in all their diversity, must be explicitly addressed.
•    Racial justice must be explicitly addressed, particularly regarding enforcement policies that have contributed to racial profiling, access to jobs, public services and due process.
•    Immigration policymaking and immigration enforcement is the purview of the federal governmentand should not be undertaken by states or other jurisdictions.
•    All raids, detention and deportation of migrants should be suspended, instead shifting resources to immigration processing and services for underserved communities.

A Human Rights Approach to Immigration Reform

We need a new paradigm for the debate that shifts from “enforcement first” to “human rights first.”  United Methodist Women national office is particularly concerned about the immigration enforcement, border control and national security focus of both the Senate and White House plans.  The current Administration has intensified enforcement, deporting some 400,000 immigrants in 2012 and spending more on immigration enforcement than all other federal criminal law enforcement initiatives combined.  The southern border is heavily militarized (now including drones), disrupting communities, leading to racial profiling and dividing families.  More enforcement, costing billions of dollars, has not stemmed the flow of immigration to the US.  This is both because of policies in home countries and US policies that make migration a necessity, and the pull of employers seeking cheap, exploitable labor.  No amount of enforcement will stem the flow when the root causes remain unchanged.

The paradigm that insists on criminalizing and deporting migrants—that see migrants as the primary problem, is fundamentally flawed.  Migrants, like our biblical forbearers Joseph heading to Egypt, or Naomi and Ruth returning to Bethlehem, must move for survival.  We must ask why they face such conditions and such difficult choices, not blame, punish, criminalize and demonize them or make them go to the back of a mythical line for making that choice.

In challenging the current paradigm that criminalizes migrants and pushes more enforcement, we seek justice for both new immigrants and US citizens struggling for racial equality and economic justice.  Our approach to the current immigration debate is to reach across communities to build a broad movement that guarantees full rights for all.  As the debate proceeds United Methodist Women will be offering additional tools for these conversations as we seek to live out the Gospel in our complex reality.

Michigan is one of only three states, including Arizona, that currently are attempting to deny these newly legalized young people the right to drive.

Sergio Martinez, a recipient of Deferred Action and AIR member said, “DREAM students deserve the right to drive to work and school, the same as anyone else. Secretary of State Johnson denied us this right, claiming that she wanted more federal guidance. Citizenship and Immigration Service’s new guidance is clear and authoritative—there can be no more excuses from Secretary Johnson.”

The new guidance reads in part:

“However, although deferred action does not confer a lawful immigration status, your period of stay is authorized by the Department of Homeland Security while your deferred action is in effect and, for admissibility purposes, you are considered to be lawfully present in the United States during that time.

Deferred action for childhood arrivals is one form of deferred action. The relief an individual receives pursuant to the deferred action for childhood arrivals process is identical for immigration purposes to the relief obtained by any person who receives deferred action as an act of prosecutorial discretion.”

The Secretary of State’s own policy states that non-citizens must present proof of “legal presence.”

Elected leaders from across Michigan requested the guidance from USCIS in December after Johnson refused to issue the licenses to beneficiaries of the new program. The leaders, including State Rep. Rashida Tlaib, pointed out that Johnson’s office was already issuing licenses to other immigrants with deferred action, and that the Secretary’s discrimination against immigrant youth may have been illegal.

If you have an IWC team at your church, great! You’re all set to get planning. If not, now is a great time to pull a few like-minded social justice-caring friends from your congregation together to make a real and lasting impact in the lives of our immigrant brothers and sisters. I have attached an extremely helpful guide called how-to-organize-for-just-and-humane-immigration-reform that walks you through planning a prayer vigil step by step in section 3–check it out! To make this even easier, I have also attached a prayer-vigil-letter that you can send to your Congressional representatives after your event to let them know what you want to see in an immigration reform bill. All you have to do is insert your church’s information and send it off! If you’d like to show the short film “Jasmine’s Story” at your event, Bill Mefford will send you a free copy of the DVD if you can email him the date you’re showing it (bmefford@umc-gbcs.org). Finally, if you’d like a handout at your event, I’ve attached a document called us-immigration-laws-timeline-um-version which I’ve spent a lot of time researching–it goes through all the most important immigration laws in our country’s history as well as how the church has been involved (it’s 6 pages, so you’ll probably want to print double-sided).

The 3 areas we are asking you to specifically pray for are:
1) protection for immigrants
2) empowerment of people of faith to speak out more boldly for immigrants and
3) moral courage for members of Congress to show leadership in enacting humane immigration reform

Please, please, PLEASE let Nikole  know if your church is hosting a prayer vigil–I want to make sure we let Bill know the total amount from the West Michigan conference and it will be easier for him to keep track of it if I just send him one message.

Thanks for all your hard work everyone–this is going to pay off in the form of some long-awaited legislation this year!

Nikole

N.Krueger@jfonwestmichigan.org

from  Benjamin Hart Posted: 11/08/2012 9:06 pm EST Updated: 11/08/2012 11:36 pm EST:

One day after the GOP suffered a crushing presidential defeat that spotlighted the party’s unpopularity with Latino voters, Fox News star Sean Hannity announced that his position on undocumented immigrants had “evolved” and that he now supports a pathway to citizenship. (Listen above.)

Musing on his radio show about how his party could convince Latinos to switch parties, Hannity proposed a solution:

“We’ve gotta get rid of the immigration issue altogether. It’s simple for me to fix it. I think you control the border first, you create a pathway for those people that are here, you don’t say you gotta home. And that is a position that I’ve evolved on. Because you know what–it just–it’s gotta be resolved. The majority of people here–if some people have criminal records you can send’ em home–but if people are here, law-abiding, participating, four years, their kids are born here… first secure the border, pathway to citizenship… then it’s done. But you can’t let the problem continue. It’s gotta stop.”

His declaration comes amid a wave of Republican soul-searching in the wake of Tuesday’s loss. One of the central takeaways of the election was that the GOP has a serious demographics problem; white voters, who have long served as the party’s base, are decreasing as a share of the country’s population, while Democrats have successfully cobbled together a slim majority with overwhelming support from Latinos, blacks and Asians.

Democrats and Republicans have not seen eye to eye on immigration in the past few years. In 2010, the DREAM Act, legislation that would have provided some undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship, failed to secure enough Senate votes during a lame-duck session, largely as a result of GOP opposition. Republicans in the last Congress then adopted a harsher tone on the issue than their predecessors. President Obama bypassed them altogether in June when he announced that his administration would stop deporting undocumented immigrants under 30 who had arrived in the United States before the age of 16.

Recently four congregations participated in a Community Diversity Dinner hosted at La Nueva Esperanza United Methodist Church: Grand Rapids First, Sparta, Plainfield, and La Nueva Esperanza UMCs. Their theme was, “We live in Grand Rapids but our roots come from all over the world.” They shared a meal consisting of ethnic dishes carried in potluck-style and table discussion exchanged immigration backgrounds. Songs were led by Pastor Jorge Rodriguez. (Pictured at right.)

Link to the Story: http://westmichiganconference.org/news/detail/2750