Obama is urged to tackle immigration reform
June 1, 2009 4:19 PM | 4 Comments

Chicago activists today launched a lobbying effort to pressure the Obama administration into taking up immigration reform before 2010, part of a week of events in 20 states that will culminate in a national prayer vigil the night before the White House is scheduled to host a bipartisan meeting on the issue June 8.

"We're here because of one simple truism: If it's broken, fix it and fix it now," Allie Kabba, vice president of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, declared before a standing-only crowd at the Jane Addams Hull House museum, on the near Southwest Side. "We can't continue to be confronted with injustice, with hopelessness, with indignity. We must always act with the fierce urgency of now."

Seeking to ramp up the pressure, a national coalition of nonprofit groups, labor unions, religious leaders and business organizations are planning to convene in Washington on Wednesday for a three-day summit to map out lobbying strategies.

The events are part of the "Reform Immigration for America" campaign, which includes Web sites in English and Spanish that send automatic faxes to members of Congress.

Though President Barack Obama has shown willingness to start discussions on what new immigration reform legislation would look like, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and other officials have cautioned that efforts to pass a new law aren't likely until next year due to the struggling economy and desires for health care reforms.

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