The post Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Trump’s travel ban targeting predominantly Muslim nations, his eagerness to deport undocumented immigrants who don’t have serious criminal records, his slurring of Mexican migrants as drug dealers and rapists, and his promise to build a southern border wall and somehow get Mexico to pay for it have provoked outraged reactions and strong resistance by immigrants, activists, law enforcement authorities, lawyers, and judges across many parts of the United States.

That reaction has been as intense in immigrant-rich Los Angeles as anywhere, and the strong emotions that Trump’s policies have triggered came into play intermittently at an August 9th Zócalo/The California Wellness Foundation event at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles.

Titled “What Does Trump Mean for Immigrant L.A.?,” the conversation, moderated by Jennifer Medina, a reporter for The New York Times, engaged a panel made up of Los Angeles Times immigration reporter Cindy Carcamo; Roberto Suro, a University of Southern California researcher and director of USC’s Tomás Rivera Policy Institute; Stephen Cheung, the president of World Trade Center Los Angeles; and Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell.

For much of the evening the dialogue rolled forward evenly, starting with Medina’s first question: “How has life changed in the Trump era?” Cheung, who was born in Hong Kong and migrated to Los Angeles through the government-sponsored “diversity lottery,” said that Trump’s polarizing words—as distinct from some of his attempted policies, which have been stalled in the courts—have aroused much of the anxiety afflicting immigrants.

But Cheung said that Trump’s immigration policies could cause a drop in foreign investment in Los Angeles County, which is home to many foreign-owned businesses that generate thousands of jobs and pump money into the local economy. The flow of 45 million tourists who annually visit the region also could begin to slow, he suggested.

Suro said the most “dramatic change” has resulted from the new administration’s willingness to target all undocumented immigrants for removal. President Obama, Carcamo noted at one point, also pursued an aggressive deportation policy; although his administration vowed to go after “felons, not families,” some studies indicate that that violent criminals constituted a minority of those deported during Obama’s presidency.

The Sheriff’s presence at the event attracted a contingent of protesters who were critical of McDonnell’s opposition to state Senate bill SB 54, the so-called “sanctuary state” bill that, among other things, would prevent local and state law enforcement agents from using their resources to assist federal immigrant authorities, notably the controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Mayor Eric Garcetti, the L.A. City Council, and LAPD Chief Charlie Beck, in addition to its state legislative sponsors and many other California elected officials, all have expressed support for SB 54.

At the Little Tokyo event, the sheriff repeated his previous stance that, if his department refuses to cooperate in some instances with ICE, ICE agents will be more likely to send their agents into L.A. neighborhoods to track down undocumented immigrants, causing even greater disruption to communities and families.

“There is a rhetoric out there that the police is an arm of immigration” enforcement, McDonnell said at one point, adding that his department is trying to balance “public safety” with “public trust.” Passing SB 54, he said, would endanger that balance.

Some protesters stood and turned their backs on the sheriff when he spoke; others occasionally hissed and snapped their fingers. At one point, a group of the demonstrators unveiled a large sign in front of the panelists denouncing McDonnell and Trump.

The panelists said there have been other forms of fallout from Trump’s hardline tactics. Carcamo said she has interviewed people who are fearful of leaving the country because they feared they’d be hassled upon their return to the United States.

“There’s definitely a perception that people will get hassled,” said Carcamo. But she emphasized that immigrants—many of whom risked their lives to come to the United States—“are very resilient” and not easily daunted by the fire and fury emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

“It takes a certain kind of person to immigrate, usually someone who is very courageous. A lot of people I have spoken with see Trump as just another kind of obstacle,” Carcamo said.

Nevertheless, Suro said that some anecdotal evidence suggests that people’s daily lives are indeed being affected by what’s happening in Washington. There are reports that immigrants are shopping less, going out less, traveling less, he said.

“It’ll take quite a while to know for sure whether the popular reaction was something temporary or whether we’re talking about lasting changes in behavior,” Suro said. As far as Trump’s public statements, Suro added, “How much of it’s bluster, how much of it’s real—it’s hard to know what to take seriously.”

During the Q & A, one audience member asked the panelists what they envisioned the future will be like for L.A. immigrants. McDonnell suggested that he thought some of the hardline words urging deportation of undocumented immigrants won’t actually come to pass.

“When you look at the rhetoric that we’ve heard with the mass deportations, it’s not something that’s practical,” he said, “so I think we need to step back and see it as rhetoric.”

One of the evening’s biggest applause lines came from Suro, who said that, even if you believe that Trump’s immigration and other policies “present an existential threat” to our constitutional system, that system “leaves lots of space for state and local authorities” to push back against the feds—including in Los Angeles, where a large share of the undocumented population has been established for years, if not decades, Suro noted.

Some of the panelists—all of whom, as it happens, are either immigrants themselves or the first-generation children of immigrants—shared painful stories of their own experiences. Cheung said there’s a long history of racist discrimination against immigrants in Southern California, going back to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. He said he was called racist names when he was young. At a Denny’s in the San Gabriel Valley, a waiter asked if he wanted chopsticks.

Cheung’s reply: “Yes, if you have them!”

Cheung later wrapped up the evening by professing hope that “we’re going to stay strong” in standing up to the excesses of the Trump era.

“Maybe I’m foolishly optimistic,” he said, “but … that’s L.A.”

The post As Trump’s Policies Harm Immigrants, How Can Local Efforts Best Help? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Now it is happening again. Trump’s immigration policies are intended to frighten the vulnerable among us and also make us afraid of them. As before, we have choices. The default has been to go along with state-sponsored fear as long as the target was someone else. We don’t have to do that anymore. This time, a policy of fear is being implemented at a moment when Los Angeles is re-re-reinventing itself. Yet again we are celebrating new buildings and new people and, this time, new openness.

But have we really learned from the past? How we respond to the fear will determine whether this chapter is different.

In demagogic rants, President Trump demonizes immigrants as sub-humans, unshackles his enforcers, and praises the “rough guys” among the immigration agents. We are asked by the President to condone brutality because we are being protected from “animals” who are transforming “beautiful, quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields.” The reality of the enforcement surge is that it has doubled the arrests of immigrants with no criminal records. As a veteran agent at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) confessed to the New Yorker, “We seem to be targeting the most vulnerable people, not the worst,” and that includes the mothers and children who have fled Central America in recent years.

The strategy is an old one: “attrition through enforcement.” Scare people into leaving and save on the costs of detention and deportation. California invented a version back in our backlash days, with Proposition 187 which hoped to make life so threatening for the undocumented that they would run back across the border. That fear campaign died in the federal courts, but it inspired federal legislation in 1996 that restricts the rights of migrants and undergirds today’s attrition efforts.

The Trump edition of this strategy is nefarious. It rejects Obama policies—“felons not families” —that prioritized serious criminals for removal over ordinary folk whose only offense involves their immigration status. Instead, “all people are on the table” now, and every undocumented immigrant “should be afraid,” according to ICE chief Thomas Homan. So, we get daily reports of law-abiding parents snatched as they drop kids at school, go to court in domestic violence cases, or otherwise find themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time.

That amounts to indiscriminately vindictive punishment by a government agency. ICE goes for the easiest catch and applies the maximum penalty regardless of the circumstances. Cops can’t get away with that for good reason—not any more, at least not here. We’ve learned through the War on Drugs and other catastrophes that such tactics are costly and ineffective and that they damage whole communities and invariably lead to abuse and corruption in the agencies involved. Not long ago we countenanced, even cheered, mass incarceration as public policy. But, we tell ourselves we are different now. Today’s struggle over immigration is a test.

So, resistance is not just about Trump, although the goal is to defeat his politics and policies. And, resistance is not just about the immigrants, although their rights and their wellbeing are important to us. Instead, this is about the kind of place we are making here, the kind of government we want, the kinds of rights we ourselves expect to exercise. Tolerance and diversity are supposed to be the cornerstones of the new Los Angeles. We’re going to find out.

We have gotten a good start. Recently, some city governments, police departments, and county jails in our region have taken important steps to prioritize smart criminal justice policies over unfair immigration controls. Sacramento is considering legislation, Senate Bill 54, that would codify and expand those practices. That work must continue and spread. No non-citizen should fear that reporting a crime could result in deportation, and no ICE agent should be able to detain someone in jail beyond a court-ordered release.

But, the Trump fear campaign demands a broader response that needs to begin with an expansive effort to ensure that all non-citizens secure their due process rights. Given the number of people under threat—1 million unauthorized immigrants in Los Angeles and Orange Counties—it will require a huge undertaking. Public and philanthropic dollars are being collected for legal defense funds, but a much broader commitment is necessary. Law schools and big law firms will have to mobilize along with faith groups and neighborhood organizations. Businesses too have a role. Effective coordination is always a challenge in this sprawling place, but the real trial will be the breadth of the response. How much do individuals and institutions not otherwise concerned with immigration get involved in combatting fear imposed on people they don’t know?

Effective legal defense leads to the next step: policy change through litigation. Lawsuits, often with states as plaintiffs, have frozen the administration’s travel bans and are challenging other policies. Much more is possible within a constitutional system that allows for considerable tussling over the limits of federal powers. To counter Democratic policies, Republican states have used the courts to push back on abortion, affirmative action and much else. Led by Texas, 26 states sued successfully to block President Obama’s 2014 executive orders on immigration. These same tactics can now combat Trump policies. California should be in the forefront.

The final step is to make this a fully welcoming state to the foreign born. We’ve already taken important measures with drivers’ licenses, health care and education to mitigate the effects of being out of status. Difficult challenges remain—starting with language access. Nearly 7 million people in this state have limited proficiency in English, and under the 1964 Civil rights Act they are supposed to have meaningful access to any government programs or services for which they are eligible. That’s nearly one-fifth of the state’s population that should never be at a loss in an emergency room or a school principal’s office. We have the greatest number of newcomers of any state by far, and self-interest dictates that we ensure they have opportunities to prosper.

Indeed, out of self-interest, California needs to develop its own policies regarding the vital supply of immigrants who make up more than one-third of the state’s prime working-age labor force. Can we, for example, ensure the necessary supply of highly skilled foreign workers while also assuring full access to technology jobs for our own kids? Can we develop policies for our agricultural workforce that meet current needs while encouraging future mechanization? Achieving these goals might require state labor permits and other measures that challenge federal control over the flow of immigrants. Washington’s monopoly is not in the constitution. It dates from the 1870s. Now is the time to test the limits.

When Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation last month that greatly extended the state’s role in combatting climate change, he said, “We are a nation-state in a globalizing world.” California has been applying that same logic to immigration for some years. Trump provokes us to go further and decide for ourselves what kinds of people should live here and how they should be welcomed. This isn’t just about him. It isn’t just about them. It is about us and the kind of place we are making here.

The post L.A. Once Feared and Criminalized Immigrants. Have We Changed? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If I didn’t have my 3-year-old son, Kelvin, I would have no energy or motivation to get up in the morning: He knows that I am going to dress him, help him brush his teeth, feed him breakfast, and drive him to school. As hard as it is to continue with life and responsibilities while my dad is not with us, I try every day to be the best person I can be for my son and the rest of my family. Also I want to prove that my dad raised a strong, independent, responsible daughter. No matter what happens I will not give up. And under no circumstance will I let my family down.

Before my dad was detained, I would go to my parents’ house every morning before taking my son to school and my son would get a kiss and hug from his grandparents and I would get a hug and kiss from my parents. It was our way of starting our weekdays off right. My dad would give my son a blessing and my son would return it. When my son now asks “What about my blessing?” I say grandpa is sending him a blessing from his heart.

My dad has lived in L.A. for a little over 25 years. I am 24 years old. For most of my life I never thought of my dad as an immigrant. He was my dad: He worked hard (at a restaurant, from 3 p.m. to 3 a.m.), paid taxes, paid rent, raised kids, and had a happy life here. He was devoted to his kids, aiming to mold us into successful adults. He was at every practice, every game, every performance and parent conference.

Recently, he’d been helping my younger sisters train for the 26.2-mile L.A. marathon. On Saturday mornings he’d wake up at 5 a.m., after two hours’ sleep, and take the girls to train, running alongside them, or riding on his bike as they ran 20 miles.

That life ended on February 28 when my mom and dad were driving my two younger sisters to school around 7:20 a.m. They dropped off my 12-year-old sister Yuleni first. On their way to another school to drop off my 13-year-old sister Fatima, my dad noticed two vehicles following him. The cars turned on their flashing lights and pulled him over, and my dad noticed that their vests said ‘Police.’ My dad asked them, “What did I do wrong officer? Why are you pulling me over?” The man said, “Shut up, get out of the car, you have an order of deportation!” My dad was then arrested and put in handcuffs and in the back of the police car. Fatima started recording on her phone while sobbing hysterically. My mom was in shock. My dad told them “Don’t worry, be strong, get help.”

My sister called me while I was pulling into the parking lot at work. She was crying and said they’d taken Dad. I said “What! Who?” She said “the police, but Dad says they’re ICE.” I told my supervisor that I had to go, and I picked up my sister Jocelyn, who’s 20 and works in the same company as I do.

I don’t remember the drive. I was crying and had so much adrenaline going that I felt strangely numb. Once I got to the location where they had stopped my family, my dad already had been taken away. My mom and sister were sitting in the car crying. I ran to them and we all hugged tightly and cried. My mom said the police gave her a card with a number on it and told her to call in two hours because he had to get processed first. When we called they told us my dad was in the basement of the 300 North Los Angeles Street building waiting to be deported.

My sister Jocelyn and I went to go see him immediately. The officers were rude. My dad was wearing his street clothes and crying. I realized he was scared. He almost never cries; he prefers to keep strong for anything that might happen. He said he was in a room with a bunch of other guys and heard they would be deported in two hours. I could not handle that; I burst into tears. We told my dad we were going to get help. We didn’t want to leave him but we knew we had to take action fast.

Meanwhile my other two younger sisters and mom were at the school they attend, Academia Avance, where a team was gathering to find a solution and a lawyer. The team started making phone calls to the city council, mayor, and other contacts to try and stop my dad’s deportation.

We all decided to go down to the detention center on Los Angeles Street and stop the bus if they tried deporting him. We went and we blocked the exit and we were waiting, praying, crying, and hoping. We saw a group of guys that were being escorted to a big van behind the fence that we were blocking. I desperately looked closely to see if any of those men were my dad. I saw them all looking out with sad faces, but my dad was not in that group.

The we got a phone call from the legal team saying my dad’s deportation had been stopped temporarily. My dad called us from the detention center and we gave him the news. It was bittersweet. I felt relief knowing my dad was not being deported, but anxiety at not knowing any more than that. That night we couldn’t sleep.

The next day we found out he had been transferred to a detention center in Adelanto, about 100 miles away from Los Angeles. We also learned more about the government’s reasons for picking him up.

Rómulo Avelica with his two younger daughters. Photo courtesy of the Avelica family.

My family and I never thought that such minor issues would put him at risk. And for all the cases we saw on television of people getting detained and deported, it never seemed like something we would go through. Since he wasn’t a criminal or a bad person, how could he ever be considered a priority for deportation? He was an immigrant, and nobody in our neighborhood or friends distinguished between immigrants and legal or illegal: We considered ourselves regular, hard-working people.

We’d been sheltered from the reality of deportation. Our family didn’t know anyone who had been through the process of deportation, so we didn’t know what to do in case this happened to us.

This terrible process has brought realizations: We have come to understand just how profoundly my dad had dedicated his life to us and our wellbeing, and just how dependent we are on him. If they actually remove him, the government will be taking away our life, our happiness, and our wellbeing.

I also realized something about being American. Before this, being an American meant being like my dad: a “good citizen” of our community. Work hard, take care of your kids, pay taxes, pay rent, help your neighbors. But the rules around immigration don’t recognize good citizenship. And they don’t recognize how immigrants are a blessing that make this country diverse and strong. Instead, they are a series of requirements for legal entrance that are so high that many people end up living like Americans, without the legal status.

The problem is that legal citizenship matters more than good citizenship. Should a paper determine your worth as a person? It is your actions, personality, hard work, dedication, and kindness along with other qualities that determine your worth. That’s why my dad taught us. If the American immigration system is going to be great again, it needs to learn that lesson too.

The video my sister Fatima made of the ICE officers taking my dad while she sobbed went viral on the internet. When I first watched it I cried—it broke my heart. When it started to get played on the news it just made us feel down. Eventually, we started turning off the news whenever they played it.

But my feelings about it changed when I realized that people from other countries were sharing it. I think the video spoke to the universal language of compassion—people could really see and feel what it was like to go through what we had gone through.

It’s a long drive to see my dad at Adelanto Detention Center. We are always happy to see him in person but feel sad seeing him in a prisoner’s uniform, skinnier and miserable. Sometimes we can tell he has been crying. He says that each of our hugs and kisses made him stronger. During the first visit, when my dad wasn’t looking and we were walking away after saying goodbye, I broke down in tears. It was the worst drive back, because we were all crying. He has been in there for approximately five months now. Patience is the hardest thing to have in a situation like this.

These months have been emotionally draining and exhausting. A major struggle for my family has been financial stability. My dad was the backbone of this household. Now me and my sister Jocelyn are pitching in to help my mother and two younger sisters stay in their home.

In other ways, my dad’s situation has expanded our horizons. My siblings and I are aiming higher; our dreams have grown. We talk more now about enhancing our education so that our voices are heard and acknowledged. One of my younger sisters, Fatima, now wants to be an immigration lawyer. My other younger sister Yuleni wants to become a marine biologist. Jocelyn is continuing her schooling with the goal of becoming a teacher. I’m planning to increase my training and become a registered nurse.

As my son gets older, I will tell him what we went through and how it molded us to be stronger. I want him to be a successful adult one day, and will tell him that anything is possible with education. Our parents raised us to be proud U.S citizens and we remain proud, despite the detention of my father. We want to contribute in the success of this country and we will, together.

On June 8 my sister Fatima finished middle school. It was extremely hard to prepare for this day knowing that our dad wouldn’t be there. This was the first graduation of any of his children that he has missed. He told us to “do everything I would do, clap loud, scream when she is called on stage, buy her balloons and flowers, and make sure to tell her how proud we all are in this accomplishment.” We followed his instructions.

During the ceremony my dad called at the perfect time, when Fatima was receiving an award from the L.A. city council office for being a voice for kids who have immigrant parents. My dad heard the clapping and cheering. They shared that moment together and even though he was 100 miles away and on the phone, we felt his presence. My mom made pozole for dinner that day and our aunt and cousins came over and celebrated. It was a good day.

The post While ICE Tries to Deport My Father, My Family Stays Strong appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

President Trump has stormed in with talk of Muslim travel bans, plans to build a wall along the Southern border, and ambitions to deport millions. And Los Angeles County has been ground zero for immigrant flows and immigration issues for decades. In the early 1980s, roughly a fourth of all immigrants coming into the United States came in through the county, prompting the anxiety and fears that in 1994 led to Proposition 187, a ballot measure that sought to strip the undocumented of any access to education or other public services.

While the pace of immigration has dramatically slowed—in fact, the share of the population that is foreign-born has been on the decline for the last several years in L.A. County—the earlier demographic tidal wave permanently changed the shores it hit. Today, roughly one-third of all county residents are foreign-born, nearly half of the workforce is immigrant, and just over 60 percent of the county’s children have at least one immigrant parent.

Any changes with immigration policy and immigration rhetoric at the national level are bound to have a local impact here. This is particularly true of the new president’s focus on “illegal immigrants” and his promise—one of the few to be put into effect—to unleash Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on a wide swath of people without legal status in the country.

In the last few years of the Obama administration, emphasis was placed—not always successfully and not always fairly—on deporting those with criminal records. What Trump has done is to essentially throw away any priorities: Anyone in the country without proper papers is fair game.

The threat of this new deportation regime is worrisome for many communities in the United States. But Los Angeles is an especially juicy target for ICE: Of the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, nearly one million are in L.A. County. And while some may still think of the undocumented as recently arrived single men whose removal is regrettable but impacts them alone, that is clearly not the case in Los Angeles.

Here, people with legal standing and those without are thoroughly intertwined both personally and economically. More than 60 percent of the county’s undocumented have been in the United States for longer than 10 years, and roughly one-fifth of the county’s children have at least one undocumented parent. Families of mixed legal status are now the norm. There are about 800,000 U.S. citizens and another 250,000 lawful permanent residents who live with an undocumented family member.

That’s a lot of our neighbors—and we’re not counting all the undocumented relatives who may live nearby but in other households. We’re also not counting intimate non-family relationships: all Angelenos who rely on the undocumented to mow their lawns, take care of their kids, or clean their houses. In present-day Los Angeles, every deportation is likely to disrupt a family, damage a business, and weaken a community—and so what happens to and for immigrants really matters for everyone.

Trump has left us living in a disquieting scenario, one that Cynthia Buiza, executive director of the California Immigrant Policy Center, describes as being “between hope and fear.”

The hope lies in the way the state’s immigrant and social movements have, in Buiza’s words, “tried to create a firewall around Trump.” Pressure has been placed on the state legislature to pass a California Values Act (SB 54) that would spread “sanctuary city” policies of non-cooperation with ICE across the state. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, a combination of county, city, and philanthropic dollars have been pooled to create a $10 million L.A. Justice Fund that will provide resources for the legal defense of undocumented individuals facing the threat of deportation.

Despite such efforts, there is understandably plenty of trepidation on the part of immigrants. Local law enforcement agencies note that reports of sexual assault and domestic violence from Latino communities have fallen dramatically—not because there is less crime, but because there is less reporting. Meanwhile, county health officials are noticing a trend in which activity in local clinics is on the decline—but activity in emergency rooms, often for illnesses that should have been treated earlier, is on the upswing.

The actual scale of the deportation threat in L.A. County has been somewhat muted by several factors, including the unwillingness of local police forces, particularly the LAPD, to cooperate with ICE, as well as several effective “know your rights” campaigns by immigrant-serving organizations. But the fear is palpable and justified: There have some well-publicized cases, including the detention of an immigrant activist and student at Cal State Los Angeles, and many of us are living with the constant worry that a relative, neighbor, or co-worker will be snatched away.

There are also well-placed concerns about what might happen with DACA, the Obama-era executive action that granted temporary status and work permits to the so-called Dreamers—undocumented youth who came to the United States at an early age and basically grew up as Americans. Roughly nine percent of all those eligible for the program nationwide were county residents, and it is likely that Angelenos constituted an even larger share of those who applied, given the maturity and depth of the immigrant-serving infrastructure here in Southern California.

So far, the Trump administration has not stopped the popular program. But as Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center, puts it, “DACA seems to be hanging by a thread.” If the president finds his policies stalled by Congress and his political standing threated by a special prosecutor, it may be tempting to shore up the support of his base with polarizing actions that do not require legislative approval.

Gutting DACA would check both those boxes: It can be done by presidential fiat, and it targets a population of “illegals” despised by a base of voters who seem unaware that no DACA recipient is actually going after their jobs in, say, coal mining. Moreover, to gut DACA would be to go after some of the most vibrant immigrant youth organizers in the anti-Trump resistance: dreamers who were instrumental in securing DACA, and have benefited from the program.

So how will L.A. respond if Trump further targets immigrants?

In the immediate future, it will be all about defense. Fortunately, major political figures like L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti have spoken strongly against the presidents’ immigration policies while Los Angeles County has moved forward with a new Office of Immigrant Affairs that will work with immigrant families to protect their rights and further their futures. The landscape is not without landmines: In tiny Cudahy, for example, pro-Trump activists from out of town are seeking to strip the fiscal base of the city (via a proposed ballot measure to end a utility tax upon which local government relies) as punishment for its status as a “sanctuary city.” But the general direction is positive.

One important effort that could help more: L.A. institutions should assist those legal immigrants who can become naturalized citizens to do so. Citizens are likely in a better position to defend their relatives—and to punish those opportunistic politicians who seek to divide. In L.A. County, nearly 800,000 adults could make that passage to citizenship—and to voting—and many organizations are stepping up to this task. An innovative program in the city libraries provides information to would-be Americans.

In the longer haul, Los Angeles will need to understand what the Trump threat has revealed: So many of us are immigrants—and so many others are one generation, one relative, one neighbor, or one co-worker away from the immigrants that Trump now threatens.

Because of this, immigrant integration is everyone’s business. And that will require that Los Angeles go beyond shoring up legal protections and promoting citizenship—key as these are—and also work to provide English classes for immigrant adults, strengthen education for their children, and secure a real toehold for immigrants in the local economy.

In the current choice between hope and fear, we Angelenos cannot adopt a false optimism—people really are under threat. Nor can we be paralyzed by panic. Instead, we must choose a third path: We must show the rest of the country what the future can be if we put aside racialized anxiety, celebrate the contributions of many people and cultures, and build the economic, social, and policy platforms for communities to thrive.

The post Want to Protect Immigrants? Help Integrate Them into Our City. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.