Website Can Inform Spanish Community Service Learning Students with Facts about Immigration

The Immigration Policy Center's tagline is: "providing factual information about immigration in America." Certainly, we need to provide our students with facts in order to counteract the rhetoric on immigration in the US that is often simply based on emotions and false assumptions. The website for their project, "Immigration OnPoint" looks very useful. Click here to see it.

Facts are important and should be part of the academic content in any Spanish community service learning course, yet I continue to be amazed at the power of individual stories in my courses as well. You can read all the fact sheets that you want, but when students interact closely for an entire semester with immigrants they gain a new, personalized perspective on the immigration debates.

But personal stories aren't enough. It's too easy for some students to form a positive relationship with certain individuals without extrapolating to the broader issues. Websites like Immigration OnPoint can help us strengthen that back-and-forth from personal stories to broader issues.

Comments

  1. tommytwotome2March 13, 2008 at 4:34 PM

    Is this about legal or illegal aliens? There's a major difference.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousMarch 13, 2008 at 6:26 PM

    Dear Jimmy,
    We need facts about both legal immigrants and undocumented immigrants.
    Ann

    ReplyDelete
  3. tommytwotome2March 13, 2008 at 7:49 PM

    There's not many "undocumented immigrants".Most of them have "documents". Forged,stolen,borrowed,copied,etc. Legal immigrants have documents.The correct ones.Just my observation.I could be wrong.

    ReplyDelete

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