The official pictures are here (notice how migrant youth are missing) and we are getting emails from Reform Immigration for America on WHAT to blog and how to go about doing it.

As expected, Reform Immigration for America was a top-down astroturf conference where speakers were usually ‘shouting’ down at grassroots advocates, tokenizing migrant youth and telling us what to do. It didn’t surprise anyone in United We DREAM–some were happy that the DREAM Act was even being discussed given the ‘all or nothing’ agenda. But lets be honest and not give undue credit–Due to our increased networking, visibility and the popularity of the DREAM Act, it is not clever to ignore youth mobilization. So the least that can be done in terms of appeasement is give ‘caucus space’ without really being welcoming.

Some were rightly simply disturbed by the divisiveness and lack of discussion. Day 3 was good — United We DREAM had space to hammer out some structure and that’s where you could see the grassroots energy.

Overall, the new mantra is ‘workable solutions that uphold our values and move us forward.’ You are sure to see those lines in the newspapers in the upcoming months. We’ll refrain from making any comments about this.

In some bad news, nothing has changed. Immigration reform discussions will be held this Fall, with a vote in early 2010. That has been the plan all along. Given electoral politics, it may just be dragged to 2011. Are migrant youth going to wait that long given Senator Durbin proclaims he already has the votes to pass the DREAM Act? The ball is in your court.