Election 2012 -- Battleground Ohio -- Jamie Longazel on Immigration

My first critic is that this entire story isn't really being told you know a
big big focus in the debate has been on whose crossing the border and whether or
not they have the proper documentation to do so, very little about why
they're coming here in the first place.
My other critique of the way politicians have been talking about immigration is
that there is
really really harsh rhetoric
really from both sides of the aisle coming at immigrants
to the point where many latino residents documented or not
are being
seen as criminal are being seen as being potentially undocumented and this
has really harmful
on the ground kind of effects i'm so i think that's my biggest critique of
of the way the debate has gone so far is that they're not talking about
exploitation they're not talking about the economic realities of this
and they're not talking about
no one's willing to really step up and challenge the
decriminalization narrative
people get a lot of their information from the media
and so
when these same debates are getting repeated over and over and over again
there being jack-hammered into our consciousness what we're finding is
that these debates this issue of immigrant illegality has become
so pervasive to the point that when you ask an ordinary citizen about the issue
of immigration
this is kind of what they talk what they talk about
i think the way forward i mean i think that the
what we should be thinking about as we move forward as is kind of forming these
class based on alliances
that are really going to challenge some of these these narratives and some
of these practices that are gonna challenge exploitation that are going to
challenge the criminalization of immigrants i think that's really the way
forward as is more of a grass roots kind of thing i mean comprehencive of
immigration reform is is needed and it's something that's important but given the
current state of our political system i'm not optimistic number one of the
getting past the number two if it does get past of it
something fruitful were really actually creating real change in immigration
system
we don't want to get to the point where we're using immigrants as kind of
a redevelopment ploy we're not
we don't want to get to the point where
bringing in immigrants is going to help us as a community and if immigrants are
going to arrive that's great but we need to help them as well and we need to
have concerted efforts to help them we don't want to pass
pro-immigrant legislation
just in order to make our predominately white communities
look-like cosmopolitan hot spots that are going to attract creative
entrepreneurs and we need to really make sure that this is a genuine effort and
genuine effort that immigrants themselves are involved
A genuine effort that's really happening from the ground up