Immigrants rallying to lobby lawmakers got an earful from state Attorney General Maura Healey about the evils of Donald Trump and his followers Monday at the State House. (Photo by Antonio Caban/State House News Service)
BOSTON – As hundreds of immigrants and supporters gathered to lobby for legislation to benefit their communities, state Attorney General Maura Healey, a Democrat, took the opportunity to brand Republican Donald Trump as an unAmerican “extremist” who threatens them and their families.
“When people like Donald Trump and other extremists – yes, extremists – want to close off America to immigrants and refugees, what does that say?” Healey told the crowd at the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition rally. “When they threaten to deport people, to build walls, to stop travel, to literally break up and break apart families, what does that say?”
“That’s not my idea of America, that’s not your idea of America and that certainly is not what America is about,” Healey said. She urged elected officials – less than a dozen of whom attended the event – to always do more to support immigrants in the state.
“Particularly in the midst of what we’ve seen over the last year in terms of the anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment across this country, it is more important now that we double down on our commitment to you and our work together with you to get to the right place to be the state, the nation, the country that we should be,” Healey said.
State Sen. Cynthia Creem (D-Newton) called for a rejection of views expressed by Trump in his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination and suggested that America’s greatness stems from connecting with and engaging its immigrant communities.
“We are the greatest nation in the world and we will continue to be the greatest nation in the world,” Creem said, suggesting that the assembled activists should discount Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. “That will happen if we stand together and we hold hands and we work to continue to be inclusive, diverse, strong and the kind of community that we all want to live in,” Creem said.
The activists congregated at the State House to push for laws they said would lead to more insured drivers, more affordable education and better relations with police. Immigrants have encountered difficulties advancing their legislative agenda on Beacon Hill.
Keynote speaker Junot Diaz, a Dominican Republic-born author who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his book “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” said the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has surrounded Trump and his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination is the latest example of immigrants being misunderstood and maligned in the U.S.
“We have folks who are organizing actively and creating a political party aimed at our destruction, aimed at the destruction and the debasement of immigrant communities,” said Diaz, who teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Folks are talking about building a wall in this country and that wall is the enemy of who we are as immigrants and in many ways stands in as a concrete symbol for the hate that we immigrants face.”
Diaz urged those in attendance to become engaged in the political process, to talk to their neighbors, to become more visible members of the community in order to provide a counterweight to Trump and others who view immigrants as sources of trouble.
“We must understand that voting is fundamentally important but it will not be enough,” Diaz said. “When people who despise everything that we as immigrants stand for are organizing against us, we must organize in turn.”
“We must do it actively, we must do it organizationally and we must do it in a way that doesn’t disappear just if Trump doesn’t get elected,” he added.
Massachusetts would have missed out on $22 billion in economic activity had it not been for the contributions of immigrant workers in recent years, according to Eva Millona, the coalition’s executive director. Healey said that only by supporting the immigrant community will America “stay the strongest, the freest, the most vibrant community, the most diverse … and the strongest economy.”
Diaz cautioned immigrants and their supporters not to attack Trump and his supporters but instead to describe a vision for a nation that welcomes and supports immigrants through a more connected and integrated society.
“If folks want to organize politically around building a wall, we must organize politically to build a bridge,” Diaz said. “Let the agents of fear and hate talk endlessly about their walls and we who have given so much to this country, we who are the essence of this country, we who are this country, will talk about the bridge,” he said. “And we shall see whose vision will survive into the future. We shall see what the future really needs, wall or bridge.”
Immigrants rallying to lobby lawmakers got an earful from state Attorney General Maura Healey about the evils of Donald Trump and his followers Monday at the State House. (Photo by Antonio Caban/State House News Service) 
