I have an idea I hope many of you might be willing to commit to.

One of the things that is so striking to me about immigration reform as an issue is that the arguments of the nativist right seems to resonate so much in the American public. People comment about immigration with opinions that are oftentimes just factually wrong, but nobody makes any attempt to refute these arguments.

My idea was to get as many people as possible here to commit to leaving comments on immigration/DREAM articles that refute the nativists and try to reclaim some parity in the debate which seems so dominated by the far right. If you would be willing to volunteer to work on this project, I will try to come up with a word document of common fallacious far right arguments about immigration and short talking points to refute them when making our own comments. We could also post examples of nativist arguments we encounter as well as compelling arguments we have develop to counter them on this thread or others.

I thought it would be most fitting to focus first on DREAM articles, so if you find a lot of DREAM articles in the newsroom on a given day, everybody should probably commit to refuting nativist views on them first. We could do CIR articles when there is not a lot of stories being printed about DREAM.

I think this could be very important in the event that DREAM did get considered again in the lame duck session. If we allow the far right to control the debate, we will never have a hope of winning public consensus behind our cause. Witness an article that appeared on Foxnews.com today about DREAM issues, which has almost 50 comments, but completely misses the fact that kids who want in-state tuition are in this country illegally through no fault of their own. They make it sound like DREAMers are cynical lawbreakers who don't want to be Americans(!) and have no shame in asking for things American citizens themselves don't get. If we could flood comment sections like this with compelling refutations, it will allow us to get a more of a voice in the debate where we always seem to be marginalized and made to be silent.

I hope you will commit to this. If you will, you can post a "hell yeah!" or something like that here, or just send me a PM.