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Transcription: [00:39:05]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
Okay, um. It's kind of a hard question. um, there's a couple of things.

[00:39:13]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
One thing I want to point out is that both immigration, refugee policy, the push factors, we are still recovering from a lot of the pain and suffering of the Cold War throughout the world.

[00:39:29]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
My family, the Civil War in Ethiopia was part of the Cold War for Salvadorians, Nicaraguans.

[00:39:37]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
It's not that these conflicts wouldn't have happened, but would they have been sustained to such a level with so many arms and these kind of things escalating and pushing hundreds of thousands of millions of people out of multiple countries.

[00:39:51]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
It, it would not have been at this level And that's a direct part of the vestiges of U.S. foreign policy and Russian foreign policy and other actors.

[00:40:04]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
And so that stuff doesn't go away. I went to Ethiopia for the first time in 1994.

[00:40:09]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
That was 2 years after the war ended, and you could still see the impact of that in so many places.

[00:40:16]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
You could still see um, you know, bullet holes in the, it was just like,

[00:40:23]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
so, I empathize so much, particularly with Central Americans in part with my experience working with that community here in DC and also because I know what it feels like, I know what it's like for that to be your family, um, and so we have to very much keep that in mind.

[00:40:40]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
Um, both in what we advocate for in immigration policy but also how foreign policy will end up impacting immigration policy in the future. The other point is,

[00:40:52]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
I just want to explicitly say this, immigration issues are black issues also.

[00:40:58]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
I'm black and my parents always raised me to be very, like, thankful and grateful for the sacrifices that a lot of communities made.

[00:41:11]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
I'm learning about the history of organizing that the Chinese American community has done and also for the black community that's helped open the doors for us to come here as immigrants after the 1960s.

[00:41:23]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
And um, in any part of the immigration discussion, there are black issues.

[00:41:30]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
In the travel ban that affected Sudan and Somalia, also, those are black countries and so that visibility isn't always acknowledged when folks are talking about immigration and that needs to be acknowledged and explicitly states also.

[00:41:50]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
That also related to policing. I grew up in a black and brown community, so that extends where the criminal justice system is often a mechanism for putting predominantly young man into immigration detention and other things for very minor offences, like in Brooklyn jumping a turnstile on the subway.

[00:42:16]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
So we have to also make sure that we keep that in mind and be inclusive and continue to frame immigrants for who and what we are.

[00:42:27]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
Right, on that note, for those of you who don't know, undocumented black immigrants are disproportionately deported in relationship to other immigrants and the reason for that is because they are stopped more frequently by the police for jumping the turnstile,

[00:42:43]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
and thus their intersection with racial profiling in the United States and their immigration status leads them to be disproportionately deported.

[00:42:53]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
So this is a very kind of crystal-clear intersection of race and immigration status. Okay, um, a couple, does anybody have questions? Anything you want to know about? Yes.