Martin Luther King Jr. said that a threat to injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous agrees on the Huffington Post, where he writes that the struggles of immigrants and African Americans are parallel.
So it is not difficult to empathize with the struggle of immigrants in our country. Like our ancestors who migrated from the former slave states of the Deep South, millions of undocumented immigrants move to the United States each year to find work and a decent education for their children. But when they arrive, they are confronted with blatant discrimination and racial profiling — with hardly any legal recourse and little public outrage.
As people of color, we have a responsibility to stand up for social justice whenever it is violated. That is why the NAACP has joined other civil rights and human rights organizations, including the Rights Working Group and the Leadership Conference of Civil and Human Rights, to support comprehensive immigration reform.
Across the country, an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants live in a permanent second-class status. Many immigrants come to the U.S. to find a better life, but find themselves living in the shadows, in constant fear of arrest and deportation. This segregation has a cost.
Read Benjamin Todd Jealous' entire piece at the Huffington Post.
The Root aims to foster and advance conversations about issues relevant to the black Diaspora by presenting a variety of opinions from all perspectives, whether or not those opinions are shared by our editorial staff.