This morning’s thoughts on ice and Minneapolis – a short one (45 minutes).
And yes, I take the issue of immigration enforcement seriously. I was involved in the sanctuary city / opposition to ICE movement in Philadelphia in 2018 – including spending the night in the snow sleeping on a sidewalk against a police barricade. But through lived experience, I came to recognize that organized activism was not being used to a productive end. Here is a short clip of me interrupting a Mayor’s Forum on immigration at Zeke Emanuel’s Perry World House on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. Democrats don’t like it when you point out that Democratic governors are also complicit in mistreatment of immigrants. What I found most interesting, however, was that the official organizers of this protest were actually upset that I disrupted the meeting and engaged directly on the issue. That says a lot. This is not a political issue. It is a strategic polarizing issue. There are “pay for success” structures being developed to manage legal immigrants, too. The eyes of the older women with the Center for American Progress hosting the event shot me daggers for daring to point out that the media stereotypes of “good” and “bad” didn’t hold up.
This clip is from the “Fearless at the Forefront” immigration event held at the Perry World House on the University of Pennsylvania campus on November 14, 2018 pressing Philadelphia’s Mayor Jim Kenney to ask PA Governor Wolf to sign the Emergency Removal Order (ERO) that would shut down the Berks Family Detention Center one of three immigrant family detention centers in the country.
Here are links to articles on the subject of social impact finance for pre-k that I wrote five years ago.
