Like many other veterans, Minnesota’s Mike Dukart credits his time in the military with giving him the ability to persevere as a businessman.
Dukart is a Marine Corps veteran who became an entrepreneur, founding Illusion Systems, a company that sells hunting call devices, including the “Extinguisher Deer Call” and the “Goose Flute Calling System,” racking up millions of dollars in sales each year.
“If it wasn’t for the training I received in the Marine Corps I wouldn’t have made it through the difficult times,” Dukart tells Daddyhood.Net. “When it comes to tough situations, the word ‘can’t’ isn’t in a Marine’s vocabulary.”
Many members of Dukart’s family have served in the Armed Forces, developing that toughness he credits with his success, and he’s especially thankful his relatives that emigrated from Germany to North Dakota in the early 1900s. “It was really amazing to listen to how they would flip the wagons over [to] survive the winter. If you think about what they endured. It’s pretty amazing, the culture they created and what’s been achieved in west and southwest North Dakota today.”
Dukart believes that new immigrants — regardless of where they come from — can make a similar contribution to America through their hard work and service, which is why he made the film “Serving America: Putting the American Dream to Work.”
“So many people forget that they too are products of immigrants,” Dukart says. “I hope this film awakens Americans to reconnect and understand what immigrants bring to the table and their contributions.”
In the film Dukart explores how immigration previously benefitted America. “It’ll touch on our military — how we as patriots have stood up to protect this country,” he says. “These hot button issues aren’t leading to the left or to the right. It’s about dealing with issues and problem solving.”
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Tag: Immigration Reform
Many Politicians Are Dragging Their Feet on Immigration Reform. But This CEO Says It’s Time
Last week several news organizations including the Washington Post and Politico reported that many Washington insiders feel any hope for immigration reform in the near future is “dead,” following the defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in his primary race. But those outside the Beltway aren’t so pessimistic. In a recent speech at the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, Greg Brown, the CEO and Chairman of Motorola Solutions, said, “Why is the timing not right for this? I find that unacceptable.”
According to Anna Marie Kukec of the Daily Herald, Brown plans to continue to advocate for immigration reform and rally other business leaders to do so, until it’s revived. According to Brown, it just makes good business sense at a time when the economy remains “fragile.”
Brown said that American businesses cannot find workers with the skills they need, due to limited visas available for high-skilled workers. He believes that hiring such international workers does not take jobs from Americans—on the contrary, it creates jobs for them.
“Immigrant workers are job generators themselves,” he said. “They have a job multiplier effect. So if our goal is to grow a dynamic environment for businesses to be created, grow and thrive, we ought to care about this as a state.”
Motorola Solutions runs programs to encourage American kids to become engineers, working with the Chicago Public Library Foundation, the Museum of Science and Industry, school districts and other organizations. “It’s about preparing the workforce for the jobs that will keep America competitive and enable kids to succeed in the 21st century,” Brown said. “But, unfortunately, it takes 18 years to make an engineer, and the crisis for talent is now.”
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Will Providing Drivers’ Licenses to Undocumented Immigrants Improve Safety?
According to the New York Times, there are around 11.7 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, many of them driving — regardless of whether or not they are licensed. Which is a somewhat scary situation facing the rest of us out on the roads.
In response, a growing number of states (including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, and Washington) have begun to issue driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants. According to the Seattle Times, as of last year all but two states — Arizona and Nebraska — had altered their laws to at least allow immigrants brought here as children to obtain driver’s licenses.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., told Andrea Billups of NewsMax, “It doesn’t given them any legal status, but by giving them a government-issued ID, it helps them imbed in society.”
As for the rest of the states who haven’t given driver’s license privileges to undocumented people yet, it might make financial sense to do so. According to Hispanically Speaking News, when the Massachusetts legislature was debating this idea in March, the head of the state’s Registry of Motor Vehicles, Celia Blue, said licensing undocumented drivers “would generate nearly $15 million in state revenue through license fees and other charges, plus $7.5 million in renewal fees every five years.” Massachusetts state senator Joseph Vital said, “This isn’t to excuse the fact that they’re undocumented. But they’re on the roads. They’re driving. Many uninsured.”
When Colorado passed a law allowing for the licensing of undocumented immigrants last June, the bill’s sponsor, state Senator Jessie Ulibarri, said that law enforcement supported the legislation, according to Reuters. “Our roads will be safer when we can properly identify everyone who drives on them. We estimate that thousands more Colorado drivers will get insured because of this law.”
Sarah E. Hendricks of Drake University wrote in her April report “Living in Car Culture Without a License: The Ripple Effects of Withholding Driver’s Licenses from Unauthorized Immigrants,” published by the Immigration Policy Center, “States that do not offer driver’s licenses to unauthorized immigrants will limit the contributions that immigrant communities as a whole can potentially make, are likely to face negative economic and public safety consequences, and tend to fail in attempts to use such restrictive state-level policies to reduce the presence of unauthorized immigrants.”
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No Longer Afraid: A Young Immigrant Victim of the Aurora Theater Shootings Steps Out of the Shadows
The violence onscreen became real life for those victims of the horrific mass shooting at the Century 16 multiplex in Aurora, Colorado back in July 2012. And for one of the wounded, the terror of the event extended beyond being injured.
As 18-year-old Alejandra Lamas lay bleeding from a gunshot wound, she worried that if she accepted medical attention, someone would discover her immigration status and if so, if she and her family would be deported. For weeks as Lamas recovered, she was afraid that the media attention to the shooting — in which 12 people died, including Alejandra’s friend, A.J. Boik — would reveal that she had been brought to this country illegally as a child.
Lamas knew that just a month before the shootings, President Obama had issued a memo authorizing deferred action on immigration charges for people like her who had been in the country since they were kids. So she continued her physical therapy and decided to head to Colorado State University as planned, despite not knowing if she’d be able to work in this country after she graduated. “I knew that my options were really limited,” she told Laura Bond of Westword, “but I had a determination to go to school, regardless of what that would mean for me financially in the future.” She was, after all, going to be the first member of her family to attend college.
Lamas contacted immigration rights groups and lawyers she felt she could trust, and learned that she could qualify for a U Visa “for victims of crimes who have suffered substantial mental or physical abuse and are willing to assist law enforcement and government officials in the investigation or prosecution of the criminal activity,” according to the Homeland Security website. Because of the trauma her family suffered, her parents and younger sister qualified for visas too, which all of them received last year.
Denver playwright and director Antonio Mercado asked Lamas if he could include her story as the opening of his new production, “Dreaming Sin Fronteras” (“Dreaming Without Borders”), which features dramatic monologues about people like Lamas who are waiting in the shadows for the long-deferred DREAM Act (which would allow for citizenship for people brought to this country as children) to be passed. Mercado told John Wenzel of the Denver Post that he found Lamas’s story striking because “she was trying to convince the paramedics not to take her to the hospital, despite the fact that she had been shot.” Lamas, who finally feels free to share her story, agreed to participate in the show.
Lamas, 20, is in her second year in college studying social work. She now pays lower tuition since last year, Colorado passed a law allowing for in-state tuition for non-citizens. “Before all this happened, I was so caught up in being ashamed of being an immigrant,” she told Bond. But now, “When I go out now, people ask me, ‘Can I see your ID?’ I’m like, ‘Why, yes, you can!” Hopefully when people learn of stories like Lamas’s, more will be convinced that the time for immigration reform is now.
MORE: Tired of Waiting for Immigration Reform, One Man is Giving Undocumented Students a Shot at the American Dream
While Washington Dithers Over Immigration Reform, a State Gets Down to Business
Were officials in Washington, D.C. elected to argue and name call or were they sent to our nation’s capital to get things done? In recent years, it definitely seems that they’ve been more interested in the former rather than the latter.
That’s especially true when it comes to the topic of immigration, which is something that has many people — from business owners seeking visas for highly-skilled employees, to those looking for temporary workers to harvest crops, to people who were brought to the U.S. as children and have no other country to call home — clamoring for reform.
Utah decided that it couldn’t wait on immigration reform from the Federal government, so its legislature passed two common-sense laws itself.
One law allows undocumented immigrants to stay in Utah and work legally provided that they pay a fine, demonstrate some English proficiency, and pass a background check. Another Utah law allows state residents to sponsor undocumented immigrants — giving them the legal right to live and work in the state.
According to the Deseret News, Republican Senator Curt Bramble of Provo said that these laws, “demonstrate that elected officials can come together and address in a responsible manner immigration.” The only problem? Utah passed these laws three years ago but it needs federal approval to implement them, because the U.S. government is solely responsible for immigration.
Utah has delayed implementing these laws until 2017 in the hopes they’ll see some movement on federal immigration reform by then. In the meantime, state citizens have put together The Utah Compact, a document endorsed by a wide range of people and organizations in Utah with the goal of elevating the tone of discussion around immigration reform. It reads, in part, “Immigrants are integrated into communities across Utah. We must adopt a humane approach to this reality, reflecting our unique culture, history and spirit of inclusion. The way we treat immigrants will say more about us as a free society and less about our immigrant neighbors. Utah should always be a place that welcomes people of goodwill.”
Now if only the Federal government would be as hospitable as the state of Utah.
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Meet the People Hoping to Change the Face of Immigration in America
You might not know it from watching the evening news, but immigration isn’t solely a Latino issue. In fact, there are more than 60 million first- and second-generation black Americans with immigrant backgrounds in the U.S. — each with a unique voice that yearns to be heard. Enter The Generation Project (otherwise known as The G Project), an innovative awareness campaign launched earlier this month by The Black Institute, which focuses on the successes and achievements that black immigrants and their descendants have contributed to the country. These so-called “Gs” emigrated from Africa, Europe, the Caribbean or South America. They all have distinct stories and backgrounds, and many of them have a vested interest in the ongoing fight for comprehensive immigration reform.
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The G Project officially celebrated its launch last week at a high-profile panel headed by New York City’s First Lady Chirlane McCray. McCray, wife of newly seated mayor Bill de Blasio, is a second-generation immigrant, whose grandmother and grandfather emigrated from Barbados. “Now, I am a G-two, a second generation immigrant,” McCray said during the panel. “But when people look at me, and hear me, they see that I don’t speak with an accent. They see me as African-American, but they don’t think about where my people came from. And I am not unique. When it comes to immigration, there are 60 million people like you and me, and our voices are too important. The stakes are too high for us to not be heard.”
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As the fight over immigration reform continues, The G Project hopes to encourage black immigrants and their descendants to become part of the conversation, developing a unified message that speaks to their experiences. As McCray noted at the panel, these immigrants and their families depend on it. “Whether we consider ourselves African, Caribbean, or African-American, everyone needs to know their heritage. Everyone needs to know their roots,” she said. “After all, you cannot fulfill your future, unless you honor your past.”
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When Immigration Reform Got Stuck in Washington, This Entrepreneur Stepped Up
Tech entrepreneur Joe Green was Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard roommate and Facebook’s sixth user, but he doesn’t share the political disinterest of some of his Silicon Valley colleagues. Having attended the mostly minority Santa Monica High School where he had a lot of undocumented friends, Green ran for the Santa Monica School Board at age 17. He won on a platform promising a living wage for service industry workers, many of whom were immigrants. In college, he studied community organizing with Marshall Ganz, who’d once worked with Cesar Chavez, and discovered parallels between community organizing and social networking. “Community organizing is all about friendships. And the Internet is all about relationships,” Green recently told Elizabeth Lorente of Fox Latino. “I ended up being someone who cares a lot about politics who also worked in tech.”
A co-founder of the company Causes, which uses social media to spur funding for nonprofits, and NationBuilder, which encourages political organizing, Green is now pressing for immigration reform through his political advocacy group FWD.us. He even got his old buddy Zuckerberg to help fund it. The group generates political support for immigration reform, on both sides of the aisle, and also works with immigrants directly. Recently FWD.us sponsored a hackathon for 20 young undocumented programmers, and afterward continued to work with the contest participants.
As Green told Fox Latino, he sees immigration as quintessentially American: “There’s a lot of stuff that America is not the best at, but when you travel around the world you see that America is pro-immigrant. … We are better than almost anybody else at welcoming people from around the world.”
This Is What the Path to Citizenship Really Looks Like
One of the criticisms of the immigration reform bill making it’s way through Congress is that it’s going to give amnesty to illegal immigrants. Makes getting citizenship sound easy, doesn’t it? Maybe this graphic will help you get a better idea of what “amnesty” really means. Immigrants have to be continuously employed for 10 years, they don’t get benefits and they must pay more than $2,000. That’s a lot of hurdles to jump over.