Immigrants' Day at the State House, March 30, 1998                                                               Response to this letter from Rep. Wolf

Dear Representative Wolf,

We are residents of Cambridge and students of the Community Learning Center. We thank you for welcoming us to the State House and wish to share with you our concerns regarding the following issues:

1. re: Status of Haitian immigrants- We feel that Haitians who were paroled into or applied for asylum in the U.S. prior to the end of 1995 should have been granted "green cards." They should have been granted refugee status, given that they left Haiti because of a valid fear of persecution.

2. re: Welfare Reform- We feel that food stamps and funding for legal immigrants should be restored to their previous levels of accessibility.

3. re: Bilingual Education- We feel that bilingual education should continue to be accessible in communities where there is a specific concentrated population of linguistic minorities that requests such a system. In other areas, more bilingual staff should be hired to provide after-school tutorials for students in need of additional help.

4. re: Department of Social Services (DSS)- Some of our students feel that the DSS is too quick to take children from their homes in cases of alleged neglect or abuse. For the sake of the children and families involved, these cases must be investigated more carefully.

Thank you, RepresentativeWolf, for any support you can lend in relaying our concerns to your colleagues. Thank you for also for your long-standing support of our programs and of efforts to increase the public funding for Adult Basic Education and English-as-a-Second Language classes.

Most Sincerely,

ESL 5 morning class/Community Learning Center