Victory is ours! Last night, the US House of Representatives passed historic Health Insurance Reform legislation that will extend health coverage to 30 million people and amounts to the largest increase in the social safety net since Medicare. The bill now has to be passed by the Senate before can be signed by the President, both of which we can expect to happen soon.
As monumental as this accomplishment is, the problems of this country are such that we can’t spend much time celebrating before we move onto other equally urgent and important issues.
In addition to being accompanied by an Executive Order barring public funding for abortions, the Health Care bill will almost certainly bar undocumented Immigrants from purchasing insurance in the exchange with their own money. This is not simply an isolated injustice, but a mere microcosm of the outrageous persecution facing immigrants in this country today.
It is not a coincidence that, on the same day the House passed historic social justice legislation, hundreds of thousands of Americans marched on Washington to demand reform of our broken and inhumane immigration system.
The Democrats made a tactical decision to brush immigrant justice issues aside in order to pass Health Insurance Reform. They now owe the Immigrant community big time and need to deliver on the overdue promise to tackle the injustice in our Immigration system.
The President said yesterday that he would do “everything in [his] power” to get a deal this year:
“You know as well as I do that this won’t be easy, and it won’t happen overnight,” Obama added. “But if we work together across ethnic, state and party lines, we can build a future worthy of our history as a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws.”
Visit Presente.org and DreamActivist.org to learn more and take action for Immigrant justice!
