April 28, 2008
by Russ Gottwald
Right Side News

Every once in a while an idea comes along that is so retrospectively obvious that one feels a bit foolish for not having thought of it first. Like the Daily Show’s original tagline: “When news breaks, we fix it.” Or registering web domains with the names of Fortune 500 companies back in the mid-90’s, then selling them to those companies for a big pile of money. Recently, another such idea has made itself known: the Green Card Day. Green Card Day is a simple concept: on May 5th, mail your Representative and/or Senator a green postcard with a message concerning illegal immigration.

As my high school English teacher used to point out, the best messages are conveyed when form matches content. So it is with Green Card Day. The mailing of green postcards to one’s Senator or Representative on May 5th is a delightfully simple symbolic act concerning the importance of immigration to the United States.

The symbolism works on several levels. The choice of green cards shows that it is illegal immigration that is the concern (as in, “green cards are what make immigration OK”). This is complemented by the intellectual irony (Cinco de Mayo is Mexico’s Day of Independence). It conveys as well the need for a multi-faceted approach to enforcement (high-tech organizing via the Web meets low-tech, difficult-to-ignore piles of physical postcards).

The actual content of the messages is entirely up to those that send them. Thus, Green Card Day can easily become a bi-partisan effort on the part of the public. So long as the message is clean and polite, anything is possible. Believe the U.S. should double its immigration quotas? Say so. Want there to be a big wall on our side of the Rio Grande? Write it down.

Regardless of the individual messages, the aggregate message to the nation’s elected officials will be clear: immigration is a major issue in this election year, and enforcement of U.S. laws concerning immigration is a necessary first step in resolving the problems with immigration policy. The presidential candidates all pay at least lip service to this notion; with clear public pressure, some sort of action will become imperative. Just as it finally happened with welfare reform, so too can it happen with immigration reform. With Green Card Day, and the enforcement-first policy it supports, the common ground for action has arrived.
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Please go to Green Card Day and get those post cards ready!
Russ Gottwald was born and raised in Richmond, where he attended St. Christopher's School. He went on to study International Politics at Georgetown University and Homeland Security and Political Science at Virginia Commonwealth University, and eagerly awaits continuing to graduate
level studies.