35: Melissa Rodgers, “Community Always Trumps Cruelty: Inside the New Americans Campaign to help 500,000 Green Card holders become US citizens.”

35: Melissa Rodgers, “Community Always Trumps Cruelty: Inside the New Americans Campaign to help 500,000 Green Card holders become US citizens.”

The goal of the New Americans Campaign is to help 500,000 - out of the 9 million Green Card holders who are eligible - become citizens by 2021, the Campaign’s 10th anniversary. There are many barriers and obstacles to meeting this ambitious aim, but Melissa Rodgers and her colleagues at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, together with the Campaign’s non-profit partners across the country, are forging ahead with courage, empathy, and wicked smarts! Join us for a conversation about the current state of immigration in the US and why it’s so important that we reform this broken system. 

Melissa Rodgers, Director of Programs, Immigrant Legal Resource Center, and Director of the New Americans Campaign

Show Highlights:

• How difficult it is to become a naturalized citizen of the US, even when you’re eligible

• The ways the Trump Administration is making it even more difficult 

• The systemic cruelty of our immigration system

• How community is a protective factor when facing such cruelty

• Law as a collaborative profession and co-creation

• The New American Campaign’s  5 principles for doing this difficult work

• How the New Americans Campaign quadrupled their network of local non-profit partners across the country 

• The profound benefits of equality under the law

• What can happen when we believe something is really doable

• Why, for many people, immigration is literally a matter of life and death

Links:

New Americans Campaign  https://www.newamericanscampaign.org/

https://www.newamericanscampaign.org/about/

Stories From New Americans: https://www.newamericanscampaign.org/from-new-americans/ 

Immigrant Legal Resource Center: https://www.ilrc.org/