Following is the text of a keynote speech I gave at the 2014 AKIN annual meeting.
State of the Immigrant Rights Movement
Good evening. I want to thank AKIN for putting together this event and for inviting me to give this talk tonight. When the steering committee invited me to speak, it was suggested that I address the “State of the Immigrant Rights Movement.” Now, if I were a politician – say, the President of the United States – I might feel obliged to assure you that, “The state of our movement is strong.” Then, after your partisan applause, I would spend the next forty minutes explaining how good old American ingenuity and elbow grease will ultimately triumph over the myriad challenges we face today in this exceptional nation of ours, this “shining city on a hill.”
But, unhappily for all of you, I am an academic. And so instead I will say this: the state of our movement is complicated. The challenges we face are numerous and far from easy to resolve.
