Current News

Rising senior has unique perspective on New Haven immigration issues

Heather Munro ´08

August 16, 2007

Heather Munro ´08 describes the day Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested 31 people in a raid targeting illegal immigrants as a "crazy day" in the New Haven Legal Assistance Association where she interned this summer.

"Driving to work, people saw vans from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) all over the city. ICE knocked down doors and took parents away from children," she said. "We represent a lot of undocumented immigrants and we didn´t know if any of our clients had been taken or not."

Munro, a cultural anthropology major and Holleran Center for Community Action and Public Policy (PICA) scholar, was one of many people in New Haven who demonstrated in protest of the arrests and in support of a new program passed by the city that would provide all residents with a municipal identification card, regardless of immigration status. The cards grant the city´s sizable undocumented population the rights to open bank accounts and get married, among other social and legal privileges that they can´t obtain without valid identification.

Munro´s support for the measure comes not only from working with immigrants on a daily basis in her internship, but also from personal experience. Although she was raised in the predominately white suburban town of Bethany, Conn., Munro participated in Project Choice, an integration program that allowed her to spend two years attending Wilbur Cross High School in New Haven, which is less than eight percent white. There, she saw first-hand the challenges that immigrants face on a daily basis.

"One of my closest friends at Cross was an undocumented immigrant," she said. "Her life was doubly or triply as complicated as mine."

The PICA program also helped Munro developed her personal views on the issues that affect immigrants and taught her about the laws and policies behind immigration. She says the program provided her with skills like public speaking, research, and conflict resolution, which are necessary to successfully assist immigrants in meaningful ways through law and special programs.

At the Legal Assistance Association, which creates resource programs for immigrants and their families, Munro, who speaks French, Mandarin Chinese, some German and some Moroccan Arabic, writes and translates brochures into immigrants´ native languages to help them better understand the resources available to them. These brochures cover diverse topics such as how to find English tutors and how to cope with issues like bullying. She also works on immigration cases.

After graduation, Munro hopes to work for a non-governmental organization and attend graduate school. This fall she will be House Fellow of Knowlton, Connecticut College´s international house, where her interests in foreign cultures, travel, languages and immigration will "mutually nurture each other."

If you are fluent in a language other than English and would like to volunteer to translate brochures for Heather Munro, please email her at heather.munro@conncoll.edu.

-By Claire Gould

For more information contact: Amy Sullivan (860) 439-2526; amy.sullivan@conncoll.edu