How We Will Advocate

Our target audience includes (1) undocumented immigrants, (2) advocates and potential advocates of policy reform, and (3) policy makers.  These are the key stakeholders who can affect policy change.  These three stakeholders each affect each other in this topic for several reasons. The undocumented immigrants are those most directly effected by this topic but also hold the least amount of power compared to the other two stakeholders due to lack of legality, rights, and the ability to vote to make change. Since undocumented immigrants are unable to vote, this is where the advocates and potential advocates of policy reforms come in to support them. Advocates can vote to make change and in turn put pressure on policy makers to make change from a legal standpoint. Policy makers are the most affective at making change as they hold the power to directly make reform, however it is up to the other two stakeholders to make their voices heard to the policy makers. Specifically, to raise awareness about current human rights violations, we will post relevant information on our blog and Facebook.  To identify and petition lawmakers, we will do outreach through email about proposed policy change.  Additionally, we will use Twitter to directly mention relevant issues for undocumented immigrants to presidential candidates.  To promote local state resources for immigrants and their programming, we will disseminate information through our blog.  Additionally, we will post this information to Facebook to help make this information go viral. 

The main advocacy tool that we will use is this blog.  To increase awareness and traffic to the blog, we will utilize other social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook.  We believe that using social media tools will be very effective in supporting our e-advocacy campaign.  It allows for us to reach many people with a variety of backgrounds.  Both Facebook and Twitter allow for sharing articles and multimedia content, which can spark activism and spread in a short amount of time.  This will allow us to begin a dialogue on social media and create buy-in from people about why immigration rights and policy reform are important.  Usage of Twitter allows for direct outreach to presidential candidates.  Increased attention and visibility in the very public realm of social media makes it more likely for even the most famous individuals to respond verbally and/or with action.

We will also reach out to organizations like the nonprofit, Immigration Advocates network (http://www.immigrationadvocates.org/nonprofit/), through organizations like this we can receive support for our cause and have a contact to locate local organizations within our state to educate and then advocate. United We Dream (http://unitedwedream.org/groups/) also connects people with local groups within their community and by even posting a link to this site on our blog will give people more awareness in their area especially if they are not from the east coast area. These sites will help advocates reach other like-minded individuals to organize and then hopefully help both undocumented immigrants and then move onto changing and influencing policy makers.

While the policy makers technically have the most impact over creating change, advocates play a large role as well.  Increasing awareness in the general population is one part of achieving immigration reform.  When advocates hold policy makers accountable for gross human rights violations, change can also be affected.  If and when immigration reform is not being enacted, it is up to the advocates to demand a plan and change.  This too can drive policy change. Overall, this work should help the lives of undocumented immigrants in educating both advocates and policy makers in how they consider and treat these individuals.