#HereToStay – 5 Ways to Help Our DREAMers Now!

Soon, I’d love to write about writing, teaching, motherhood, and the myriad other topics that I planned to discuss when I began this blog. However, this has been a year for activism, and as many of you know, I had a poetry chapbook, If We Were Birds, published earlier this year to advocate on behalf of our DREAMers.

They need our support more than ever now! We have approximately 10,000 DREAMers residing in Indiana and 45,000 in Illinois alone, and 780,000 nationwide, 96,000+ of whom have already graduate from college. If the graduates, especially, lose DACA with no replacement, many will lose professional positions and with them, the opportunity for livelihoods that support independent living or affording families with young children.

It is time for DREAMers to be given a permanent solution to their citizenship issue; the United States of America is the only home that the majority of them even remember and the only culture they know. They deserve to feel secure, instead of fearful, anxiety riddled, or depressed, and to be able to invest in futures that cannot be ripped away at a moment’s notice.

5 Ways to Help Our DREAMers Now Include

Become informed about the Acts that have been introduced to Congress.
Telephone your Congressional representatives and Speaker of the House to tell them that you not only support DREAMers, but also which Act you are asking them to back in the House and Senate: Indiana Representatives Paul Ryan
Sign the following petitions: MoveOn.org CREDO
Donate to the following organizations: United We Dream MoveOn.org ACLU
Use social media to raise awareness. Tweet Congress. Post about the issue, asking your friends and followers to advocate on behalf of our undocumented American kids.

So…what are you waiting for? Click, click, click! Let’s make the U.S. a better place!

In solidarity,

Janine

Author: Janine Harrison

Janine Harrison freelances, teaches creative and freelance writing at American Public University, is a teaching artist, and serves as the 2017-18 Highland (IN) Poet Laureate. She wrote If We Were Birds. Her work has appeared in Veils, Halos, and Shackles: International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women, A&U, Not Like the Rest of Us, The Wabash Watershed’s “Six Indiana Poets” feature, Treehouse Arts, and other publications. She is a poetry reader and reviewer for the Florida Review and a former Indiana Writers’ Consortium president. She speaks, reads, and leads workshops and other events around the Midwest. Janine lives in Northwest Indiana with her husband, fiction writer Michael Poore, and daughter, Jianna.

2 thoughts on “#HereToStay – 5 Ways to Help Our DREAMers Now!”

kathrynpagecamp

September 9, 2017 at 9:10 pm

This is an opportunity to give the Dreamers some legal certainty, which an Executive Order can never do. I agree that they need to be allowed to stay in this country, and a Congressional solution is best.

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Janine Harrison

September 20, 2017 at 5:54 pm

Thank you, Kathryn, for your comment. I appreciate your time. Since you’re a lawyer, it’s very good to hear you say both that DREAMers need to be allowed and that Congress is the place for the issue to be settled. From what I’ve read, I agree about the Executive Order; however, it did allow DREAMers a few years of driving and work privileges, so I’m not sorry that President Obama issued it. Let’s hope that within the next six months, the clean DREAM Act can be passed!

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JANINE HARRISON