Imagine an American-born citizen whose mother is a foreigner who married an American soldier. Imagine that the soldier was the only American-born child of Canadian citizens whose parents’ immigration status is obscured by the fog of history. Did they slip across the border in Maine when the guards weren’t looking? Were there border guards at all? What would you call their grandchild?
Well, the editor of the Providence Business News for one. And, a son of the United States.
And so we come to today’s hot-button issue – immigration.
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Legislation is wending its way through both houses of Congress. At the moment, the House is more focused on clamping down on immigration and criminalizing “bad” behavior; the Senate seems to be moving toward creating a more forgiving path to U.S. citizenship that does not curtail the economic activity that the millions of illegal immigrants contribute to the U.S. economy every year.
We think the Senate approach is more appropriate, but the final shape of the contentious law that will address the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States today is far from certain.
As the work on this important measure moves forward, we need to remember that we are a nation of immigrants on these shores, and it is immigrants’ vitality that has made this country the economic powerhouse of the world.
Investing an old term with new meaning
Collaboration, in certain wartime contexts, is not a flattering term. But in the real-time economics that drive success today, it is a concept that businesses had better embrace.
In fact, the R.I. Economic Development Corporation has made collaboration the centerpiece of its vision for the future of the state. The EDC’s Innovation @ Scale project is built around a statewide laboratory for multiple business partners to create new products and services. The R.I. Wireless Innovation Networks, designed to develop a statewide broadband wireless network, is one of the largest projects to come out of the EDC, and if it works, it will be evidence that the concept has merit.
A partial list of the 10 collaborators is impressive, including IBM, which is the project manager, Brown University, Cox Communications, CVS/pharmacy and Verizon Communications. It is worth noting that Cox and Verizon are rivals in the business and consumer communications field in the state, but are now on the same side of the broadband wireless initiative. Their partnership is an example of the new calculus – and, we hope, a sign of things to come in Rhode Island.
