Green Bay Student Leaders Fight for Immigrants and Open Borders

The following was written by SFL’s Midwest Regional Director, Sam Dunkovich.

With the newly appointed president, Donald Trump, America has seen a protest renaissance in response to his many executive orders targeting people in seven Muslim-majority countries. Seeing these many protests occurring around the country, I sought out a local protest in Green Bay, Wisconsin, which is my college city. When searching, I found no results and decided to plan my first ever march to show support for immigrants, refugees and the right to move freely between countries.

When creating a Facebook event for the march, I expected at most one hundred people being interested. This was not the case and after inviting a few fellow student leaders the event had over 500 people interested in just 24 hours. In the end the march had around 300 people from across the community marching to support the cause. The march consisted of religious communities, churches, immigrants, refugees, university students, and community leaders. One protester I had the pleasure of meeting was actually a Syrian refugee who was with her five children. I learned she was a pathologist in Syria, and since moving to the United States, she has had to redo her education from the beginning.

Initially the goal was to push the city government to become a sanctuary city, though after talking with community leaders we decided this was not what the impacted communities wanted, due to the fear of becoming a targeted city by the Trump administration. For this reason, we made it more about building a sense of community, and celebrating the people who came to America to escape authoritarian regimes and endless war.

The event got local media attention, including from our local Green Bay Press Gazette and WBAY, which gave us a platform to talk about immigration and borders from a liberty perspective, and condemn the rise in nationalism.

Since having our march, myself and some of the fellow marchers have decided to work together to keep the fight going. Inspired by Students for Liberty’s statement of support for immigrant students, we have made it our focus to work and fight for policies to protect all students regardless of their immigration status. I encourage everyone to get involved. In America, immigrants and refugees are in need of liberty now more than ever.