When the economic ladder sinks, it’s the bottom rung that goes under first. As the rest of the country has recently begun worrying about job instability and uncertain benefits resulting from the economic crisis, those who have walked across deserts, ridden for days beneath the floor boards of buses, and those who have scrambled in the shadow economy to provide for themselves and their families are surely thinking, “Middle America, welcome to the rest of the world.”

Great organizing campaigns are like great love affairs. You begin to see life through a different lens. You change in unexpected ways. You lose sleep, but you also feel boundless energy. You develop new relationships and new interests. Your skin becomes more open to the world around you. Life feels different, and it’s almost like you’ve been reborn. And, most importantly, you begin to feel things that you previously couldn’t have even imagined are possible. 

The war against immigrants has just taken another turn for the worse with the passage of SB 1070 by the Arizona state legislature. This law is designed to criminalize undocumented immigrants, all who help them, and ultimately all who "look" like them! It is a continuation of a 20-year battle that will ultimately determine the future of the US. Winning full political and economic rights for 10 to 15 million immigrants will have an impact comparable to that of freed slaves and the rise of Black reconstruction in the 1860s and 1870s or to the formation of Roosevelt's New Deal coalition in the 1930s and 1940s.