American Conservative Daily Your daily dose of conservative offsets to combat annoying liberal global whining.

• • Home
  • About ACD
  • Interactive Polls
  • Join/Post
  • Media Relations
  • Quick Start
  • T-shirt Straw Poll
  • Terms Of Use
    • Book Reviews (General):
    • Communication/Email
    • Copyright:
    • Email Use Policy:
    • Moderators
    • Posting Comments
    • Responsibility of Authors:
    • Submission of Material:
    • Syndication:
    • Trolling Defined
• Conservative Shop
• RSS

Green Card Day

Carolyn Hileman - The Voice* | April 29, 2008 

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.

Share This

Contributor's website: http://thevoice.name




*Content posted by a user may not be completely written by that user. Content from another source is cited in either block quotes, with quotes or with a link to the original material. Content from other sites is posted for commentary and news purposes under fair use. Each user is responsible for their own postings and a particular posting should not be construed as being endorsed by this site or it's owner.