How about a new comprehensive, humane plan for immigration? While president-elect Barack Obama acknowledges that the US economy depends on millions of undocumented workers living in the shadows, the issue of immigration reform has itself remained in the shadows. The question of how attitudes toward 11.9 million undocumented immigrant workers will or or won’t change in a workplace of diminished opportunities for everyone needs to be called.

Well, there are those with a progressive plan and a new method of presenting the issue to the public. The idea is to change the frame that the Right has constructed, where immigration = border security and immigrant = criminal. The approach is to get up close and personal – talking about the experience of migration with a view to encourage policy that is responsive to people’s needs, rather than political jockeying.

The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization looks at the big ideas embeded in our immigration policy, about who is and can be an American. We welcome co-author, Rinku Sen, executive director of ARC, the Applied Research Center and publisher of Colorlines magazine; her co-author and one of the heroes of the book, Fekkak Mamdouh, a restaurant worker and union activist at the Windows on the World restaurant at the World Trade Center who organized the workers after that crisis; and Mamdouh’s partner, Saru Jayaraman, an attorney, activist and professor. They co-founded ROC: Restaurant Opportunities Centers United which has set out to represent what they say is the some 40% of NYC’s restaurant workers who are undocumented.