Matt Foreman On Immigration Reform

"In the early days of the HIV/AIDS crisis, the anti-gay folks divided people with the disease into moral categories. You were either 'good' or 'bad' based on how you contracted the disease; and gay people, of course, were on the bad side. The current national debate over immigration reform has a similarly disturbing, divisive and moralizing undertone that echoes those early days of HIV/AIDS.  The classification of immigrants into 'good' and 'bad' camps is undermining the effort to create a common-sense immigration process that creates roadmap to citizenship for all new Americans. Let's not buy into it.

"A lot of people - gays included - put undocumented Americans into two categories: the 'innocent/good' and the 'illegal/bad.' The good category includes immigrants who are graduating from U.S. colleges with high-tech skills in science, technology, engineering, and math (the 'STEM' students), young immigrants who were brought here at an early age by their parents or other relatives (the 'Dreamers'), and foreign partners of U.S. citizens who are gay or lesbian. The bad category is just about everyone else--or the overwhelming majority of the 11 million new Americans with whom we rub shoulders every day." - Matt Foreman, writing for the Bilerico Project.

Read the full essay.