Thank You...

for giving to the fund to feed immigrant farmworkers and their children over the winter. In November we gave food to 80 immigrants, in December to 40 people and in January to over 100 people. Your donation has allowed us to purchase food at the Food Bank of Western Mass. But, we still need your help. Most families won't have steady work until late March or April and are struggling to feed their families and pay their bills.

In December, with the collaboration of Brightwood Health Center and the impetus from Marty Nathan, MD, we began offering a medical clinic for immigrants who have no health insurance. Some individuals are visiting a doctor for the first time since coming to the US. Many have serious medical problems which have gone untreated and require attention. The Pioneer Valley Project has started a special fund to help immigrants purchase medications they need and for visits to specialists. The clinic is available to immigrants twice a month, during the evening. We are encouraging everyone to come to the clinic to establish a relationship with a doctor and to get a check up and we're helping people connect with dental care, which is a critical need.

Over 100 people came to our January meeting where we shared information and a meal. We surveyed the group about their needs and they told us that their most pressing problems include lack of work over the winter, needing help paying for heat, transportation problems (because they aren't eligible for drivers licenses), and wanting to learn English. We continue to provide information about their civil rights and offer them access to legal services. In January we started offering ESL classes once a week, free to all who would like to learn.

This weekend we'll have our monthly community meeting where we'll talk about a community garden project , how to support families who need child care and to support individuals who are providing day care so that we can make this service more affordable and more effective for all involved. We will also offer to assist families to access heat (some have none because they can't afford oil) and to help people sign up for fuel assistance to help them pay their heating bills.

We still need your help to continue to purchase food for March and hopefully April. If you would like to contribute to the food fund or the medical fund please send your check to the:

Pioneer Valley Project

c/o Holy Family Church

235 Eastern Avenue

Springfield, MA 01108

Please specify the immigrant food program or the immigrant medical fund.

Thank you!

Posted for M. Cuerda.

Immigrants Come Here Because Globalization Took Their Jobs Back There

Excellent article by Jim Hightower on AlterNet.

The wailing in our country about the "invasion of immigrants" has been long and loud. As one complainant put it, "Few of their children in the country learn English ...The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages ... Unless the stream of the importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious."

That's not some diatribe from one of today's Republican presidential candidates. It's the anxious cry of none other than Ben Franklin, deploring the wave of Germans pouring into the colony of Pennsylvania in the 1750s. Thus, anti-immigrant eruptions are older than the United States itself, and they've flared up periodically throughout our history, targeting the Irish, French, Italians, Chinese, and others. Even George W's current project to wall off our border is not a new bit of nuttiness -- around the time of the nation's founding, John Jay, who later became the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, proposed "a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics."

Luckily for the development and enrichment of our country, these past public frenzies ultimately failed to exclude the teeming masses, and those uproars now appear through the telescope of time to have been some combination of ridiculous panic, political demagoguery and xenophobic ugliness. Still, this does not mean that the public's anxiety and simmering anger about today's massive influx of Mexicans coming illegally across our 2,000-mile shared border is illegitimate. However, most of what the politicians and pundits are saying about it is illegitimate.

Click here for full article.

May 1st 2007

May 1st is only a few months away! Here are some photos from last year's rally in Amherst and march to Northampton.High school students.

Speak Out
March from Amherst to Northampton.

Immigration in Spain and the Pioneer Valley

The Republican newspaper has a great article in today's paper in which Jim Ayres (of Center for New Americans) is interviewed. Among other topics, "Immigration bill a lost opportunity" details some of the ways stalled Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) has affected communities in Northampton/Amherst, Holyoke and Springfield.

If you are interested in volunteering a couple of hours a week as an English tutor for adult immigrants in the area, visit the Center for New Americans or The International Language Institute.

Good Neighbor Fund

The Sprinfield-based Alliance to Develop Power is holding their Good Neighbor Fund Kick-Off in Amherst on Tuesday, January 29th. For more information, click here.