Mateya Kelley, Yale College '05

With many thanks to the Liman program, I spent my summer working with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights in Chicago (“the Coalition”). I learned a lot about immigration, leadership, community organizing and politics, in addition to becoming the resident expert on Microsoft Access (a database program). I very much enjoyed the summer and the work. I met diverse, thought-provoking people and found a lot to do. I found so much to do, in fact, that I’m staying with the coalition through September 20th to finish working on an immigration reform advocacy tour of Chicago that I proposed and, working with another intern at the coalition, have spent much of my summer putting together. Overall, I found through my experience a new respect for a democratic system that daily inspires people to act publicly—and a fresh hope in the power of such people.

The Coalition was born in 1986 as a public interest coordinating committee to help eligible, undocumented immigrants through the new legalization process offered by the Immigration and Reform and Control Act (also of 1986). Like five other groups across the country, the committee brought together legal and social service providers, community and faith-based organizations and government networks to help find and move close to three million applicants (nationally) through the system.

Twenty years later, the Coalition is now an institution with 18 staff members, 130-plus member organizations and a cluster of programs that strive to empower people not only to respond but to shape and to make laws as well. The Coalition’s long-term strategy is to help new Americans at every step of the way along a continuum of legal status and civic engagement, from “undocumented” all the way to elected official. It has started the wheels turning on this political machine. For example, working with its member organizations, state and local governments, the Coalition now runs the largest citizenship drive in the nation, the New Americans Initiative (NAI). The program expects to help 20,000 legal permanent residents in Illinois to be citizens within the next two years. For new and old citizens, the coalition also continues to run New Americans Vote (NAV) — a voter registration drive that brought in 67,000 new voters in 2004 —and has just launched the New Americans Democracy Project, a program that builds on NAV by training community leaders to work in local political campaigns and gets them thinking about running for office themselves. And the Coalition has successfully introduced and worked to pass laws in Illinois, including one of the first acts extending the in-state college tuition rate to undocumented students.

But the bulk, and heart, of the Coalition’s work still goes toward trying to overcome the biggest hurdle for immigrant communities: legalization for the undocumented. The Coalition works to break this wall primarily through grassroots mobilization. It does community organizing and leadership building in combination with voter registration, public demonstrations and media outreach, all aimed, currently, at persuading the Illinois Congressional delegation to support a new legalization act. I began my work with the Coalition by cleaning the office’s tiny, messy kitchen. The funny thing about community organizers, I learned, is that they tend to leave in their wake a lot of things that need to be organized. The motto is: “don’t do for others what they can do for themselves.” This includes washing dishes (and coffee pots, walls, etc.). But they also much appreciate “taking action,” even little ones, and so I am happy to report that I was honored on my first day in my first staff meeting with the coalition’s staff-of-power/stick-of-justice for my outstanding action. And then I was given my next task.

I was assigned to the communications director and given the job of sorting through and updating ICIRR’s media contacts, a sprawling web of people and organizations plugged into a Microsoft Access database. As I tried to update the information, I found that the data were often repeated or oddly placed and, consequently, were often incorrect and not searchable by query. It was inefficient, and unusable by anyone who didn’t already know it all. So I went about fixing it. I spent my first few weeks learning how to build tables, forms and queries in Access (no one in the office knew how); reorganizing the data; updating the information; and adding categorical tags to each record, so that, for example, anyone could quickly find a reporter for a local-interest Spanish-language newspaper in Congressional District Four.

Meanwhile, I was also learning how, say, that database capability might be useful by observing meetings and events across all of the Coalition’s programs. (And I participated whenever possible. I often took pictures for the Coalition and made press calls/pitches.) In my first six weeks, I attended numerous oath ceremonies (where we regularly register voters); a media-spokesperson training for community leaders; a press conference for the release of a new study; a workshop guiding legal permanent residents through applications for citizenship; a series of meetings with community leaders to plan the big annual all-member meeting; the big annual meeting itself and symbolic graduation for youth leaders; a march for immigration reform with close to 10,000 people (not led by ICIRR); a hearing before the Cook County Board of Commissioners regarding the passage of a county resolution in support of immigration reform; and another press conference when the resolution passed. It was a lot to take into focus. But it was clear to me in every case that the highlight — the point — was people telling their own stories.

During my fourth week with the Coalition, I came up with a way to add to the advocacy effort by bringing the stories that were so moving me to people who might help but would otherwise never hear them. Or, rather, I suggested bringing such people to the stories by putting together an “exciting and educational” bus tour. A fellow intern from the University of Chicago took to the idea as well and agreed to help me do it. And after some discussion, a formal proposal and a sign-on from the Coalition’s policy and executive director, the staff liked the idea enough to launch the project by renting us a coach bus and pointing us towards September.
Since then I have done sundry other things for everyone around the office. Notably, I helped set up a new master contact list database, designed the logo for the New Americans Democracy Project and worked on logistics, designed a flyer for a public demonstration that is being distributed all over Northern Illinois and two “take action” flyers for other events. (I’m go-to-girl for Access and Photoshop.) I also arranged another smaller tour of Chicago, this one a four-hour, three-stop affair for six journalists from Juarez, Mexico. This was part of a “border journalism” tour initiated by the US Consulate in Juarez that also stopped briefly in DC and Texas. It was all good fun and good practice.

I have dedicated most of my time, though, to putting together our own tour, “Comprehensive Immigration Reform in Chicago: Face-to-Face.” On September 16th, the tour will bring 30 or so public and private leaders from around the metropolitan area to four historic sites in Chicago—the Downtown Islamic Center, Erie Neighborhood House, the Chinese-American Museum of Chicago and St. Agnes of Bohemia catholic church. At each site, participants will learn about the long history of Chicago’s immigrant communities and the need for reform today through the personal stories of local community members. The tour hasn’t happened yet, so I can’t relate how it all turned out; but putting it together so far has been a tremendous learning experience.

I started by reading more about Chicago’s history and getting to know the neighborhoods. I then worked with staff to select four sites that would tell the story of an immigrant nation and city well, would welcome us and our work, and connected with a good story today. I reached out to each site, met with someone there, signed them up for our day, and have been working with them ever since. Notably, I’ve been working with staff at each site to bring a local family to tell their story. I also reached out to folks at the Chicago Historical Society and the Jane Addams’ Hull House Museum to join us on the bus as between-site narrators, and worked with our policy director to bring a local immigration researcher (specializing in demographic and economic impact) to speak as well.

Our goal for the tour has been to create an experience that the coalition could use to reach out to two groups. The first is elected officials who are working with the coalition but are unconvinced that new laws should include a “pathway to citizenship” (or legalization) for undocumented immigrant. Toward this end, we now have on the bus a few state senators and representatives, and one congressional staffer. (I hope to get a few more.) The second target group is potential allies who we are not yet working with. For this we have an increasingly diverse bunch coming, including representatives from foundations, chambers of commerce, local colleges and universities (including an art school), and the American Library Association. I’ve also reached out to suburban press editors, free lance journalists and even the community relations director for the Chicago White Sox (who cannot come but is officially interested in the coalition’s next big event, a convention in November, and maybe an “International Americans” day at the ballpark).

In the end, I hope that our arguments and stories will move people to act on the issue, in whatever way they can, as the staff and members of the Coalition have moved me to act. And I hope that we will leave the Coalition with at least a few new converts and contacts to help them in their work.

If you let them, they will push you. They will step forward, and they will lean in, and they will ask: Why are you here? In the elevator, at the conference/lunch table, hanging over my desk, the staff at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) asked me: why are you here? I told them that I wanted to be in Chicago. I told them that I had spent my sophomore summer on the other end of the visa line, behind the glass in the Consular Section of a US Embassy in Central America, and I wanted to see another side of the immigration issue and the public sector. I told them that I wanted to learn more about how things got done, about how change and laws were made. I told them I liked their work. In his office, the Coalition’s head community organizer leaned in and told me that if I wanted to move people, I had to know where I wanted us to go, and exactly where I and we were starting from—and that I would need a better answer than all that.

Throughout my experience with Coalition, I have been trying to find a better answer. I might add, now, that I’m here working with the Coalition because I was so moved by so many who I have heard. I remember, in particular, calling all my friends after my first week here to tell them about "Wilber.” I met him, a Mexican-American suburban high school student, with a Mexican flag on his shirt and an NYPD baseball cap on backwards, over dinner at a media-spokesperson training run by ICIRR in a small church meeting room. My new co-workers had gathered 40-plus people from Chicago’s western suburbs to talk about how they could, together, convince the Illinois Congress to support comprehensive immigration reform this year. But Wilber, born a citizen himself, came to help his born-elsewhere friends who he had grown up with here in the States.
Why are you here? I asked him. He told me he came because he saw his friends’ futures ending. Better people than he, he insisted, “people who challenge me to do better,” he said, are being prevented from attending the vast majority of colleges and universities, universally excluded from financial aid or grant opportunities, are unable to work in most places and professions and powerless to do anything about it without fear of their lives with family and friends being ripped apart. He had recently protested the issue in front of his local congresswoman’s office with ICIRR and had seen her respond publicly in support their demands. He seemed to earnestly believe that he and we could do much more.

I answer the project manager now; but I can also say that I’m still here with ICIRR through September, trying to do better, working on an advocacy tour of Chicago that I have proposed and (with help) spent the summer arranging. I’m here trying to bring around metro-area leaders to hear what I’ve heard, to meet people who may be affected by pending immigration reform legislation and, with any luck, to persuade and inspire them to help make some change. So I’m here to push some people, from apathetic to active citizen.

I will spend this early October through early January in Hong Kong (with thanks to Davenport college) photographing curious translations in context and volunteering as a research intern with a policy think tank there. In the spring, I plan to move to Washington D.C. and to look for work with Congress. We’ll see what happens from there.