BOSTON - The Anti-Defamation League of New England, which is primarily known for combating anti-Semitism, plans to put significant focus on the fight against what is says is rising hostility against immigrants. Leaders of the ADL said they are alarmed at the animus toward immigrants that is surfacing as the country debates how to secure its borders.
”We fight against bigotry in all forms,” Andrew Tarsy, regional director of the ADL of New England, told The Boston Globe. ”It has become clear both in the extremist world and even in the mainstream that the conversation about immigrants is laced with bigotry.”
The ADL effort will include directly reaching out to immigrants, advocacy on state and local immigrant issues and monitoring hate activity in communities. The ADL also plans to meet with police chiefs and alert them of possible tension over immigrants in their communities.
On Thursday, the ADL will host its first immigrant-themed Passover Seder, titled ”Nation of Immigrants,” which will feature readings from the Book of Exodus and of stories of immigration throughout the dinner.
Tarsy said there has been an upsurge in anti-immigrant activity nationally among organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. He said locally the ADL has received reports in the last week of hate literature about immigrants being distributed in southeastern Massachusetts.
Tarsy said a March 6 immigration raid at a New Bedford leather goods factory, and the consequences for families of arrested workers, ”put a human face on this abstraction everybody’s talking about.”
Regardless of one’s stance on border control and immigration laws, the raid demonstrated the need ”to treat people with greater compassion,” Tarsy said.
Tarsy said that minority groups gain power when they unite and that it is in the Jewish community’s interest to reach out to Hispanics, the fastest-growing minority group in the state.
Vanessa Calderon-Rosado, chief executive officer of Puerto Rican Tenants in Action, which is helping organize Thursday’s Seder, welcomed the ADL efforts.
”I don’t think there were many efforts in the past to bring together Latino and Jewish communities,” she said. ”We haven’t done a good job yet.”