To continue with the theme I wrote about last week, I decided to follow some twitter conversations about the DACA issue. It may have just been the twitter pages I was looking at, but I was dismayed that the majority of the replies I saw were in favor of Trump’s decision to rescind DACA. The pages I looked at were those of Senator Kamala Harris, Senator Patty Murray, NPR, and the Los Angeles Times. I really expected to see more replies in favor of DACA on these pages. It seemed as if Senator Harris had the most negative replies. I was surprised to see the amount of people who don’t agree with her who are looking at her tweets. She seems to be followed by a lot of trolls. It’s disturbing that powerful women have to endure so much negativity.
For this post, I am going to focus on the thread of replies to a tweet on the Los Angeles Times feed from September 12th, 2017. The tweet was, “California governor, legislative leaders allocate $30 million for ‘Dreamers’ in wake of DACA decision” with a link to the corresponding article: lat.2wY12FK. The first reply mentioned that with California’s homelessness problem, the state would be better off with the $30 million for that. A very common response on this, and other feeds, was the suggestion that the money could or should be used elsewhere. A reply to that first response made the point that money is being allocated through Measure H, as well as other measures, to combat homelessness. This was to make the point that money is being allocated for other issues as well. But many in the thread just thought that taxpayer money shouldn’t be spent on, as they called them, “illegals”.
The insensitivity to the plight of young people who were brought to this country as infants or children, grew up here, and know no other life, is just baffling to me. A common theme in the thread is the opinion that the California government takes better care of immigrants than they do those who were born in this country. As one poster said, “Must be nice to be a Dreamer…”. Another said, “All of the illegals seem [sic] like they always get rewarded”. I am really saddened by the lack empathy exhibited in most of the replies in this thread. There were 51 posts in this thread, and only two people replied with, what I see as, common sense.
So my experiment with looking at conversations on what I thought would be twitter pages with a higher number of open-minded people, ended up being pretty disheartening. I’m still trying to figure out why the negative comments outnumbered the positive ones on these pages. I did hear some good news on the DACA issue today, however. The Los Angeles Times tweeted today, September 13, 2017, “State Senate committee approves budget proposal to assist DACA recipients in California: latt.ms/2h3SDpP. There is also a quote from Governor Jerry Brown, “California stands with the millions of immigrants who make this state a vibrant and prosperous place.” I also saw on the news today that House leaders were going to meet today on the future of Dreamers. This meeting was instigated by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California. So there is some room for hope.
Organizing at Prescott 