Immigrant rights activists energised by a new Democratic administration and majorities on Capitol Hill are gearing up for a fresh political battle to push through a proposed bill from President Joe Biden that would open a pathway to citizenship for up to 11 million people. The multimillion-dollar #WeAreHome campaign was launched Monday by national groups including United We Dream and the United Farm Workers Foundation. It starts with ads on Facebook and other social media to reach lawmakers and the constituents who can pressure them. We are home, a young woman s voice declares in the first video spot showing immigrants in essential jobs such as cleaning and health care. Home, even when they say we don t belong.
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Citing a lack of access to testing for many vulnerable essential workers, a group of researchers teamed up with a local health clinic to organize pop-up COVID-19 testing events in the central Illinois town of Rantoul.
Despite tens of thousands of COVID-19 cases and hundreds of deaths, agriculture workers struggle to access one of the most basic tools to fight the spread of the coronavirus testing.
For more than a decade, Saraí has been a farmworker, cultivating corn and soybeans in the fields of central Illinois. She moved to the U.S. from Mexico to find work that would allow her to better support her family.
Updated on January 25, 2021 at 11:29 am
Joe Klamar/AFP via Getty Images
The 51-year-old farmworker from Oxnard, California, has the same questions about the coronavirus vaccine as many other people, but she is anxious to get it for one simple reason.
When she and her coworkers move through the fields picking strawberries, they cannot put enough distance between themselves to be safe.
“In reality we are not keeping the six feet that are being ordered for safety steps since the lines in the fields are a lot closer in proximity to each other,” she said in Spanish, relayed through a translator. “We cannot keep it.”
To simplify vaccine rollout, California considers an age-based system [San Francisco Chronicle]
Jan. 23 In an effort to simplify and speed up California’s troubled coronavirus vaccination rollout, state health officials are considering shifting to a priority system primarily based on age a move that could preserve access for residents 65 and older, but bump down access for some younger essential workers.
The state’s possible move comes amid a backdrop of falling infections. San Francisco Mayor London Breed said Thursday on Twitter that the city “could start reopening soon,” because its transmission rate had dipped to the point where each person with COVID-19 passes it on to less than one person, on average.
President Joe Biden plans to introduce a bill that would open a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, garnering cautious optimism from immigration advocates.
The new president also promised a 100-day halt to deportations of people already in the country, while the proposed bill would recognise the US as a nation of immigrants, changing the legal term “alien” to “noncitizen”.
Advocates celebrated the proposal, which Biden planned to introduce as early as Wednesday – the same day he took office, as the most progressive immigration legislation since Barack Obama’s administration’s failed reforms in 2013.