Paul Bass Photo
Tabitha Sookdeo at WNHH FM: "It's all connected."
Tabitha Sookdeo has a new job helping undocumented young people stay settled here — and addressing the conditions that lead some others to come here.
To her, the two issues, immigration reform and climate change, are related.
“It’s all connected,” Sookdeo said during a conversation Thursday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” about the job she began this month as executive director of Connecticut Students for a Dream (C4D).
“People are being displaced because of climate change. How do we ensure that people who are being displaced by climate change are not doubly displaced? What does it look like in our host communities to make sure that we have robust climate adaptation plans?”
Sookdeo, a 30-year-old emerging New Haven make-things-happen civic leader, was a “dreamer,” a young person born abroad and brought to the U.S. in childhood by her parents. She spent her teen years in Jacksonville, Fla., after living first in Guyana and then in St. Maarten. She advocated for undocumented immigrants, including in her last job as director of community engagement for New Haven’s Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS). She became involved in New Haven’s Dwight neighborhood civic groups, too (as well as the Rotary Club).
C4D works on behalf of an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 undocumented young people and their families in the state. It has successfully advocated for expanding HUSKY (Medicaid) coverage for dreamers up to age 15. Sookdeo said the group will lobby now to adjust the state’s fiscal guardrails formula in part to support expanding the coverage further. It will join similar groups nationwide in organizing against a renewed push to have the DREAM Act declared unconstitutional; and to eliminate provisions in proposed Congressional immigration reform legislation that empowers state or local cops to act as ICE agents and limit due process rights.
Sookdeo said she hears from young people involved in C4D that they’re also interested in addressing climate change. She was already on the same page: At IRIS, she worked with Urban Resources Initiative (URI), where she previously interned, on an effort to hire 50 refugee children as “tree ambassadors” through a federal grant. Now, in addition to her full-time C4D job, Sookdeo is finishing up a joint Vermont/Yale law and environmental management program. Her goal for putting those degrees to work: “to empower displaced people” with a climate-change focus.
“You might not hear immigrants talking about it, who are getting to the United States, but they might be describing climate change,” Sookdeo observed. “They might be saying the land is no longer arable. The rain is not falling like it used to, or the rain is falling too much, and crops are being completely killed. We’re hearing a lot of these types of stories.”
Click on the video below to watch the full discussion with Connecticut Students for a Dream Executive Director Tabitha Sookdeo on WNHH FM’s“Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of“Dateline New Haven.”