We Are America Alliance
We Are America Alliance (WAAA) is a national alliance of immigrant rights organizations and allies in the United States. It advocates for comprehensive immigration reform and immigrants' civic participation. The alliance was formed out of a collaboration around the 2006 immigration reform protests, which mobilized more than two million people nationwide during spring, as well as a civic participation campaign during the 2006 elections.
Convening organizations
- Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA)
- Center for Community Change
- Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR)
- Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy (MIRA) Coalition
- National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities (NALACC)
- National Capitol Immigration Coalition (NCIC)
- National Day Laborer Organizing Network
- National Korean American Service & Education Consortium (NAKASEC)
- New American Opportunity Campaign (NAOC)/Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CCIR)
- New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC)
- Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworkers United) (Woodburn, OR)
- Service Employees International Union (SEIU)
- UNITE HERE!
Name
"We Are America" was a popular slogan and chant sung during pro-immigrant marches of the 2006 immigration reform protests in the United States, along with "Sí se puede" ("Yes, it's possible", meaning that people's power and immigration reform were possible). It pointed to the fact that undocumented immigrants although not lawfully present in the United States of America, were part of the nation as families and workers.
Many regional immigrant rights coalitions sprung up across the country that adopted "We Are America" as their name; among those are the We Are America Coalition of Arizona and the We Are America Coalition of Southern California.