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TGIF, Illinois. We’ve had some week. Cheers to a quiet weekend (please).
TOP TALKER
Chicago
Mayor Lori Lightfoot accused Ald. Ed Burke Thursday night of trying to sabotage her plans for Covid-19 relief funding the way he thwarted legislation decades ago during the notorious Council Wars.
Bipartisan virtual summit calls for overhaul of the immigration system
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MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. – The Immigration Partnership & Coalition Fund, a Miami-Dade-based organization that advocates for undocumented immigrants’ rights through bipartisan action, hosted a virtual summit on Thursday.
Billionaire Mike Fernandez, who was born in Cuba, grew up in New York, and now lives in Coral Gables, founded the IMPAC Fund in 2017 as the Florida chapter of the American Business Immigration Coalition, which promotes immigration reform.
“Immigration should change during 2021,” Fernandez said. “To remain as it is, it’s simply unacceptable.”
The summit comes as Democrats are focusing on the new immigration bill that President Joe Biden sent to Congress and before former President Donald Trump appears at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando.
Commentary: Rebecca Shi - Resilience of immigrants is rebuilding America
Rebecca Shi
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Undocumented immigrants are powerful examples of resilience built from years of plowing through setbacks and disappointments. Now they are steadily and quietly powering our economy back to life. Their resilience is rebuilding America during the pandemic, and they deserve citizenship from a grateful nation.
I came to the U.S. from China when I was 10. My parents came of age toward the end of the Cultural Revolution there. The government reinstated the college entrance exam. My father became a heart surgeon, my mother a pathologist. Economic policies in the early 1990s opened China to the West, and my father entered a postdoctoral program at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Photograph by Lydialyle Gibson
“I’m really here today, not just as the president of Harvard, but also as the child of immigrants,” Lawrence Bacow said Friday, joining nearly a dozen other speakers including U.S. senators Ed Markey (Massachusetts) and Angus King (Maine), and Massachusetts congresswoman Ayanna Pressley taking part in a New England-focused virtual summit to advocate for comprehensive immigration reform. Several hundred listeners logged on to hear testimony from elected officials, businesspeople, activists, DACA recipients, and essential workers. Nirva Sajous, an undocumented immigrant from Haiti with temporary protected status who is a health-care worker at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and at an assisted-living senior center, talked about the extra stress and insecurity that the pandemic has added to her life. Javier Juarez, a DACA recipient, spoke about his journey from Lima, Peru, to college at Brown University and a job at an advocacy organizatio