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| ImmigrationThe Challenge: The Roosevelt Institution challenges its students to create a fair system for immigration and to improve immgrants' rights and living conditions. Important Progressive: accomplishing this challenge will contribute directly and specifically to the progressive values embodied by Roosevelt's Statement of Principles Immigration has historically been a pillar of strength for the Unites States people and the United States economy. It has brought a diversity of ideas, of ethnic groups, of religion, and of skills to our country. Our economy's continued growth depends on it. And today, immigrants do not receive the rights and privileges they are due as productive members of society, and not even as fellow human beings. We must work with legal and illegal immigrants currently in the country to assimilate them into society, and develop policies for future immigration that take into consideration the needs of our economy, our workers and the people of the world in need of refuge. Innovative We're looking for policy challenges where innovation is needed: where there isn't already a clear solution or best practices, but solutions can be developed creatively. Our goal is to develop options, not to lobby or advocate for a solution that is already known or to debate among several yes or no outcomes or pre-defined policy choices. Other organizations do the important work of debating and lobbying, that's just not our place in the process. Immigration is a multifaceted and complex problems. The old solutions will no longer work. We need new programs for assimilating immigrants, for providing basic social services, and for helping ensure that businesses do not abuse basic workers rights. Feasible Approachable: given the level of research and discourse already available and given who else is working on the issue, college students with a range of experience levels and with varied types of expertise can contribute meaningfully to the debate and are likely to think of good ideas. We don't want something so technical only engineering majors can contribute to it, or something that is already dominated by another think tank or advocacy organization. Solutions must happen at all levels of government. Cities like New Haven have already taken local measures to work more closely with immigrant communities, adn there are many other things to be done on the local level to help families and integrate neighborhoods. On the state and national level there is an obvious need for coordinated policies and a full response. CommentsThis isn't really even a proposal - the only recommendations in here are vague and bland. We do need to recognize the importance of immigrants for American society, but this proposal seems to pursue the issue with no regard to how immigration is negatively impacting working families - that's not progressive. We also need to be concerned at the high level of immigrants on student visas in our science and technology programs. This is dangerous. In response to Daniel's comment -- it would probably be good to reformulate the challenge to include making sure immigration is not used to keep wages low and divide working people against each other. But the goal isn't a specific policy proposal or set of proposals -- it's a challenge that would produce a set of recommendations or proposals. What we don't want is "we should close the border, set up a fair system for allocating visas, and produce a path to citizenship" because that doesn't encourage further public policy research, that's one of those "we already have the answer" situations. There's no sense in throwing out a solution because it is (appropriately enough) a big challenge. Coming from a border state, there are lots of policies to explore. Safe haven police policies that don't check immigration status, collaborative projects with Minutemen and immigrants, enforcement tactics for those that do hire illegal immigrants, more equitable visa allocations, etc. |
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