Mexican Champion for Human Rights Bishop Raul Vera Lopez Urges Immigration Reform

His Eminence Bishop Raul Lopez Vera shares his views on immigration reform.

On Tuesday May 20 local community and religious leaders, along with immigration advocates and Pilsen residents welcomed one of the most important Latino defenders of human rights, his Eminence Bishop Raul Vera Lopez from Saltillo in Coahuila, Mexico. Bishop Vera Lopez has long been an outspoken champion of human rights throughout Mexico and Central America, he is well aware of  the plight immigrants face in the United States when they are apprehended.

Community Leaders (From left to right: TRP Community Organizer Rachel Bennett, Political Director for Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights Jose Artemio Arreola, and TRP Executive Director Raul I. Raymundo)

He urged people to advocate for a comprehensive immigration reform, one that would stop deportations and the separation of families. “There is forced immigration due to the impossibility of reaching a dignifying quality of life in a country that lacks progress” but first we must stop deportations and think of the root of the problem, perhaps “unifying the economies of US, Canada, Mexico and Central America” to solidify a strong regional economy in which immigration is not portrayed as an ill but as a means to prosper.

Bishop Vera Lopez shared that NAFTA (North America Free Trade Agreement), which he directly links to the immigration issue, needs to be renegotiated to include a labor, environment and human rights clauses to help the problem of immigration be ameliorated.