It's really great to see so many passionate, active, and involved people here using their freedoms as Americans to protest the situation with respect to illegal immigration.

I would like to offer a word of caution however on simply grabbing any and all information you find on the internet and posting it here. The internet is an informational free-for-all through which anyone can publish almost anything. We want to be relatively assured that what we circulate is accurate. In many instances, it is perfectly fine to post information and let the reader decide how they feel about it. In other instances, it can be damaging to the cause to get bogged down in information that ultimately proves to be not accurate, an urban legend, rumors, etc. If you can, try to verify anything stated as fact: For instance, there was a rumor circulating around that stated alleged facts about retail sales on May 1st. A few phone calls and emails to the authorities that track that kind of information proved that it was not true. We want to maintain credibility and not get labeled gossip-mongers and crazies.

Where authors are alleging to have some information of an "inside nature" about a government, official, program. It is always wise to do a little background research on the author and their standing in their respective fields or areas of research and adding a link or two to that information with the post. While I'm on the topic of links: when a pertinent article is of great length, it is always helpful to readers here if you can provide the link with a brief summary and not the entire article itself. It saves space on the threads and prevents readers from getting discouraged by all the scrolling so that they don't read all posts in a thread prior to replying.

I would also highly recommend the News section for those who haven't been there yet. You will find a large, informative collection of articles...many of which keep getting reposted in General Discussion. In this same vein, it would really help all of us to get to the most timely and relevant information if folks would do searches by subject matter and read what is already on the board on that subject to avoid a lot of repeat postings. This would be most beneficial to our new recruits but good for all of us as well.

Lastly, we need to try to keep on topic. This Immigration Reform is a complex issue touching many aspects of our government, business, finance, and social organizations. The players and puzzle pieces are numerous and wading through it all becomes burdensome when we get bogged down in the irrelevant.

This is a momentous time in our history. We have the opportunity to make a difference. We do not have the luxury of time and need to concentrate all our efforts on what we need to know and do in order to have our voices be heard and the will of the people implemented.