"Politics is about inclusion"
Recently I sat down for interviews with the popular Brazilian publications Folha de São Paulo and Veja. The interviews were conducted in Portuguese, but through the miracle of Google translate you can read the Veja article in English. Today at 2pm I'll be interviewed in Portuguese by the Brazilian-American media (WLYN 1360 AM Boston / Radio Manchete USA). Be sure to check our website to catch the story!
The Brazilian media has made much of the fact that if our campaign is successful, then I will be the first Brazilian-American immigrant to be elected to federal office in the U.S. The interviews got me thinking about how my Brazilian heritage informs my run for Congress.
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An immigrant's journey
I started on the road to social justice advocacy very young. As a child I grew up in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood, with some neighbors who were Brazilian immigrants like me. My favorite neighbor Paola and I were alike in major ways: we were both born in Brazil, came to the U.S. as kids, lived on the same block, and went through the same public school system.
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Paola graduating from college
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There was one crucial difference in our childhoods: because I have an American father, I could visit my extended family in Brazil ever year, but Paola could not, because she was undocumented. That meant never being able to see her Brazilian relatives, including her dad after he was deported.
Missing her family was hard but it didn’t stop Paola from being a great student who now works at a women’s health nonprofit and is considering a masters degree to become a physician's assistant. Despite being an American taxpayer who people entrust their health and even their lives with, Paola is unable to vote, and under the Trump administration lives in fear that she will be detained and deported from the only country she has ever called home.
This experience of having friends living in the shadows helped shape my view of democracy. After graduating, many engineers from my class at Stanford joined technology companies or struck out as entrepreneurs. But when I got the chance to be an early team member at the social justice advocacy organization Emerson Collective, I didn't hesitate. Here was a chance to help direct the power of Silicon Valley toward the issues I care about most: racial and immigrant justice, rethinking education, and strengthening our democracy.
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"I saw things I couldn't unsee"
When I think of Paola, who, even if the Dream Act were to pass today, will not be able to vote until after she turns 35, I think of more than the Dreamers - I think of all the immigrants fleeing violence, war and poverty, turning with hopeful faces to America.
What's happening at our borders has outraged many Americans, including immigration lawyers and elected representatives like Congresswomen Ayanna Pressley and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren who have visited the detention facilities that are now the center of so much focus. In my past work I've visited multiple immigrant detention centers, and can personally testify to the horrendous conditions we've seen reported in the media.
Our current immigration crisis encompasses more than the asylum seekers in overcrowded, unhygienic, private detention facilities that need urgent intervention. The current crisis is a failure of planning and values. We need a new system design for immigrant justice that is humans-first, including increasing immigration lawyers and judges, eliminating the green card backlog and removing profit incentives from the system.
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