This past Saturday, over 300 community leaders, elected officials, and immigrant rights activists came together to celebrate a very simple but potent reality: “Our Vote is Power.”

European, Asian, Hispanic, African, and Arab immigrants alike chanted the slogan at the kick-off of the non-partisan, national campaign to get out the immigrant vote. New Americans Democracy Day brought together immigrant organizations across the country who have made a commitment to mobilize voters to stop the attacks on their communities.
While national and local leaders and politicians who have advocated for immigration reform addressed the crowd, dozens of immigrants filled out the paperwork to become citizens and eventually be able to vote.

All of this work is being done for the very simple reason:

Communities across the country feel that they are under attack by the drumbeat of anti-immigrant media personalities, anti-immigrant ordinances that criminalize whole communities, unending citizenship and visa gridlock, and the expanding deportation-only enforcement policies that tear families apart without due process or sufficient accountability.

In fact, just yesterday, the Illinois Review blog attacked Democracy Day with the bogus claim that the goal was for "non-citizen voters to steal an election."  Demonizing all immigrants in this country with outrageous statements like this is a sad but frequent tactic used by many in the immigration debate.

It is absurd to think that the Illinois Review’s authors believe that non-citizen men and women would knowingly risk deportation from the place that they've struggled so hard to make a life for themselves and their families in to vote in an election.  This is a blatant attempt to play on people’s fears of immigrants, fears that are drummed up daily on network news and talk radio.

The immigrant vote is made up of naturalized citizens, first and second generation Americans, and the children of immigrants who are as American as the authors of the Illinois Review.  

In Illinois, immigrant communities are fighting for better access to immigrant integration initiatives like English classes and citizenship workshops, as well as driver’s certificates and humane immigrant detention legislation. 

Nationally, immigrant communities are mobilizing to:

1. Build a pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers, families, and students.
2. Unite immigrant families by ending visa backlogs and providing legal channels for immigration
3. Tear down the second wall to citizenship by reducing the application fee and diminishing gridlock in background checks and processing
4. End the appalling treatment of immigrants in detention centers who are jailed without due process and held in inhumane conditions.

In Chicago, during the New Americans Vote 2008 Campaign, ICIRR will register 20,000 new American citizens and mobilize 60,000 immigrant voters to the polls in November. The Coalition is training its state-level sister organizations from Colorado to Mississippi on successful strategies to turn out the vote this week, during a GOTV Bootcamp that runs through July 3rd.

Immigrant communities are not sitting idly by— they are responding to the attacks by organizing themselves to become citizens, registering those who already are citizens, and turning out their communities on election day. Attacks like those by the Illinois Review are good reminders of the importance of what we are fighting for- justice and dignity for all people in this nation.