This past Monday, CAA and our community leaders joined the California Immigrant Policy Center’s Immigrant Day of Action which saw immigrant-serving community-based organizations across California coming together to build power and advocate on four pressing policies:
1) Health4All: SB29 (Durazo)/ AB4 (Bonta, Chiu, Santiago)
2) CalEITC: AB 1593 (Reyes)
3) No Private ICE Act: AB 1282 (Kalra)
4) California Act to Save Lives: AB 392 (Weber)
In addition to supporting these bills, CAA also specifically advocated for the following issues:
1. Census Outreach Funding: Based on the Census Bureau’s published plans to-date, CAA has identified major concerns to a full and complete count: language access, digital divide, and distrust in government. Immigrants and limited-English proficient communities will likely bear the brunt of these challenges.
Home to over 6 million limited-English proficient immigrants, California must take a proactive approach to operationalize solutions in the next year. CAA applauds the historic $100.3 million investment by the State of California that contributes significantly to these efforts. For example, a robust language access plan and sensible partnerships with community-based organizations serve as a gateway to civic engagement with Hard-to-Count (HTC) communities.
2. Workforce Development, ACR50: This measure would state the Legislature’s commitment to removing barriers and ensuring that good jobs and career pathway programs are accessible to all while promoting equity and inclusion in hiring practices.
The measure would call upon the state’s workforce system to improve access to workforce development for all Californians, ensure representation of impacted communities in the decision making processes for developing workforce strategies, create more effective training programs for Limited English Proficient individuals, remove barriers for individuals reentering the workforce, create goals and metrics that are directly tied to improving equity and access to workforce development and quality jobs for all Californians, and build equity and accountability into our state-funded workforce development programs so that all Californians can participate meaningfully in, contribute to, and thrive in our current and future economy.
3. One California: Immigration Services Funding
We appreciate the legislators and our governor’s continued support and investment in the “One California” program, which provides urgent and critical legal services and education and outreach to impacted immigrant communities. As harsh federal immigration policies test the well-being of immigrant communities across our state, One California bolsters the following services:
• Community Education & Outreach to ensure non-citizen Californians understand their rights and immigration remedies
• Naturalization Services to protect green card holders from deportation by applying for citizenship
• Affirmative legal services to support DACA recipients and undocumented Californians apply for affirmative immigration remedies
• Defensive legal representation and services provided for immigrants in deportation proceedings
• Legal training, legal resources, and technical assistance offered to support competent legal representation of noncitizen clients by public defenders.
Education & Outreach is important to our immigrant communities across the state. The unique and diverse immigrant communities required linguistically and culturally competent approaches to reach out to and provide them with in-language and reliable immigration updates and information. Otherwise, communities wouldn’t be able to get access to these immigration legal resources which are available to them.
During our legislative visits, our community leaders were able to speak with Catherina Nou from the API Legislative Caucus and ask questions on language access initiatives, higher education priorities for immigrant youth and #Health4All.
You can find our tweets from our participation in Immigrant Day of Action below:
