NDN Blog

We at NDN know the value of the corrido. We used this culturally rich and powerful medium in our song "How Little They Know Us", which was played in 2006 during the immigration debate under our Demócratas Unidos media campaign.

Today's New York Times reinforces the corrido's effectiveness by showing how, recently, they are serving as an outlet for those frustrated with the tone of the immigration debate. From the article:

While watching the immigration marches that day, Mr. Garcia said he felt compelled to put “our story” to music, scratching out the words over several weeks, right up to the day the folklife center researchers came calling.

“I feel we need to write out stories and this was a big part of our story here,” he said. “Corridos used to be like newspapers. Well, maybe, they still should be.”

NBC Nightly News did a piece last night on the rise in U.S. citizenship applications, which has been a widely covered issue of late. Click here for video of their coverage.

Naturalization applications are on the rise according to this article from the New York Times. Citing the imminent rise in processing fees and the immigration debate as the reasons for the rise, the article reveals that many are now applying for citizenship so their voice can be heard, and felt, in government. From the article:

For many legal immigrants, worry about their futures in the United States turned into action after an announcement on Jan. 31 by Citizenship and Immigration Services that it would increase application fees.

Under the new fees, which take effect on July 30, it will cost $675 to become a naturalized citizen, up 69 percent from $400.

Immigrants have also been mobilized to press naturalization applications by a television and radio campaign that Univision, the national Spanish-language network, began in January in California.

The campaign, promoted by personalities like Eduardo Sotelo, a radio host in Los Angeles known as El Piolín, or Tweety Bird, has directed immigrants to 350 workshop centers run by churches and other community organizations in 22 cities. At the centers, immigrants receive English lessons and advice on meeting requirements and filling out forms.

One radio listener was Ángel Iván Álvarez, 24, a legal immigrant from Mexico who said he had never thought of becoming a citizen until last week when the Senate bill failed.

UPDATE: This Miami Herald editorial serves as a follow-up, showing how we need to make progress even though comprehensive reform suffered.

- Scott Maxwell offers his opinion on how the democratic candidates did at this past weekend's NALEO Forum. (Note: adding to the Spanish-language credentials of the Democratic field, Maxwell notes that Dennis Kucinich closed his speech in Spanish. Well done, Congressman!)

- Chris Cillizza takes a brief break from vacation to offer his thoughts on Barack Obama's fundraising report on his blog, The Fix.

- In his first visit to New Orleans as a candidate, Rudy Giuliani linked border security to terrorism saying, "if you don't end illegal immigration, almost nothing is possible, because no matter what you do, things are going to get worse." That's interesting, given his past comments on immigration.

- Hillary Clinton launched a new feature, HillCam. The service allows people to sign up to receive video reports from the Clintons as they travel across Iowa.

- On a lighter note, the New York Times profiled Cindy McCain, the charitable wife of John McCain.

- Joe Biden wrote an op-ed in today's Miami Herald on the recent opinions of the Supreme Court.

- The Des Moines Register offered an overview of the forum held jointly by Iowans for Tax Relief and the Iowa Christian Alliance this past weekend. One of the better performances of the forum went to Mike Huckabee, who comes across well in this video from a speech he gave in New Hampshire:

For more information on NDN's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election, click here.

I'll be posting more on the 2008 race as the day progresses, but I wanted to give the video below particular emphasis. It shows Chris Dodd being interviewed in Spanish by Univision in his green room at this past weekend's NALEO Presidential Forum. This short video helps show how versatile certain candidates are, and also helps underscore how incredibly beneficial the skill of speaking in spanish can be at a time like this.

For more information on NDN's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election, click here.

Just a reminder to tune into tonight's Democratic presidential debate, the All American Presidential Forum at Howard University, being hosted by Tavis Smiley at 9 PM ET on PBS.

This is fantastic.

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It is now clear that we are not going to complete our work on immigration reform. That is enormously disappointing for Congress and for the country.

But we will be back, and we will prevail. The American people sent us here to act on our most urgent problems, and they will not accept inaction.

I have seen this happen time and time again. America always finds a way to solve its problems, expand its frontiers, and move closer to its ideals. It is not always easy, but it is the American way.

I learned this first as a child at my grandfather's knee. He taught me that in America, progress is always possible. His generation moved past the cruel signs in the windows saying "Irish Need Not Apply," and elected that son of an Irish immigrant as Mayor of Boston.

I learned that lesson first hand when I came to the Senate in 1962. Our nation was finally recognizing that the work of civil rights had not ended with the Emancipation Proclamation, nor with the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. It was up to Congress to take action.

The path forward has never been an easy one. There were filibusters of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But we did not give up, and we prevailed.

The same was true in our battles for fair housing, and for an end to discrimination against persons with disabilities. On immense issues like these, a minority in the Senate was often able to create stalemate and delay for a time. But they have never been able to stop the march of progress.

Throughout all of those battles, we faced critics who loudly warned that we were changing America forever.

In the end, they were right. Our history of civil rights legislation did change America forever. It made America stronger, fairer, and a better nation.

Immigration is another issue like that. We know the high price of continuing inaction. Raids and other enforcement actions will escalate, terrorizing our communities and businesses.

The 12 million undocumented immigrants will soon be millions more. Sweatshops will grow, and undermine American workers and wages. State and local governments will take matters into their own hands and pass a maze of conflicting laws that hurt our country. We will have the kind of open border that is unacceptable in our post 9-11 world.

Immigration reform is an opportunity to be true to our ideals as a nation. Our Declaration of Independence announces that all of us are created equal. Today, we failed to live up to that declaration for millions of men and women who live, work, and worship beside us. But our ideals are too strong to be held back for long.

Martin Luther King had a dream that children would be judged solely by "the content of their character." Today, we failed to make that dream come true for the children of immigrants. But that dream will never die. It has the power to overcome the most bitter opposition.

I believe that we will soon succeed where we failed today, and that we will enact the kind of comprehensive reform that our ideals and national security demand. Soon, word will echo across the country about the consequences of today’s vote.

But we are in this struggle for the long haul. Today’s defeat will not stand. As we continue the battle, we will have ample inspiration in the lives of the immigrants all around us.

From Jamestown to the Pilgrims to the Irish to today's workers, people have come to this country in search of opportunity. They have sought nothing more than the chance to work hard and bring a better life to themselves and their families. And they come to our country with their hearts and minds full of hope.

We will endure today’s loss, and begin anew to build the kind of tough, fair and practical reform that is worthy of our shared history as immigrants and as Americans.

Immigration reforms are always controversial. But Congress was created to muster political will to answer such challenges. Today we didn’t, but tomorrow we will.

When Apple announced the iPhone, which goes on sale this Friday, there was little doubt that its entry would change the face of the mobile market, forcing consumers to re-think the cell phone. The New York Times, however, adds Hollywood to those attempting to accommodate the new possibilities that the iPhone (and other products that are likely to come after it) offers. From the lede:

The iPhone doesn’t go on sale until Friday, but Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, is already changing the perception of the mobile phone, from a quick way to call a friend to a hip, media-friendly device. In doing so, he has forced mobile phone and Hollywood executives to react by chasing hungrily after the newest thing or face being left behind. 

Mobile phone makers are scurrying to offer new products to compete with the iPhone’s touch screen. Wireless carriers also seem more willing to listen to their partners’ advice. And in Hollywood, where Mr. Jobs’s convention-defying tactics are all too familiar, media executives are eagerly preparing for a new era as they hope to position more content where consumers want it: in their hands.

Peter Leyden, the Director of our New Politics Institute just announced our new NPI paper on The Progressive Politics of the Millennial Generation. Check out the text (and links to the paper) below:

One of the most underappreciated assets for progressives in the early 21st century is the rise of the young Millennial Generation, the biggest generation in American history, and one that is clearly trending progressive and voting Democratic in large numbers.

The New Politics Institute released a new report that is a comprehensive look at almost all available surveys and polls that have tried to figure out the politics of this important new generation of young people born in the 1980s and 1990s. The cumulative evidence shows that this generation is overwhelmingly progressive and unusually engaged in politics.

The Millennial Generation has the potential to become a core constituency of the progressive movement and could help sustain political majorities for a long time. By the 2008 election nearly 50 million of them will be eligible to vote, and by the 2016 election, the entire generation of 82 million people will be of age.

No one in politics can afford to ignore this emerging generation born between the years of 1978 and 1996. And they are not just passive political consumers, but actors who are adept with the powerful new participatory tools that NPI has long championed.

The report was released at an event in Washington DC this past Thursday, June 21st. Video from the event will be posted on the New Politics Institute website shortly for those who were unable to make it. Check out the full report as either a "pdf" or "web version" both with live links to all the reports we cite.

Feel free to pass the report around – especially to those in the Millennial Generation who are only now coming to understand the importance they will play in American politics for a long time to come.

For those of you in or around D.C. today, be sure to come check out our New Politics Institute's event at 12pm on the Progressive Politics of Millennials.