by Rick Jacobs

(originally posted at Huffington Post) 

Dreams Across America has hit the rails! (Sorry Lou Dobbs, it's the train rails and we're headed to DC. ) At 2:30PM today, 46 of us left LA's Union Station after a send off by Cardinal Mahony, LA's most popular morning radio show host "El Cucuy," about 100 onlookers and a White House-sized press gaggle. The most stirring speakers, however, were the "Dreamers" themselves, the folks who took time off from work and family to travel for a week from LA to DC to show the nation the real faces of the broken immigration laws.

Cathy Gurney of Chico, California, a wife, mother and owner with her husband of a landscape company that employs sixty people, was the emcee of the press conference today. She spoke clearly and plainly about the need for reform of the ridiculous system we call the immigration statutes. As you will see from her video, Cathy is part of the backbone of America -- the small businesses that generate most of the employment in our country. Cathy wants to hire people at high wages; she just can't find enough employees. One thing is for sure: folks who work for Cathy are not taking away anyone's job. She has more demand than there is supply.

This gets to the heart of the matter. When there are strong economic imbalances, such as we now have with the less than perfect trade agreements that are in place with Mexico and other countries, we export poverty while magnetically pulling workers north. So rather than address what is an essential flaw in policy and law, our government dithers while families and businesses like Cathy's suffer.

The LA Times reported today that some 63% of the American people favor immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for the twelve million or so undocumented folks who currently live here, some for decades. Only about 45% of the US Senate was willing to vote to consider a hodgepodge of a bill that would have begun to address the issues of immigration reform. Can someone explain to me why the Senate has less sense than the people it supposedly leads? Are those senators so afraid of a few loud voices in a tiny minority that they won't even march behind an overwhelming majority of Americans?