Jennifer Gordon and Elizabeth Scharpf Give Us Their Opinions

We always knew that Echoing Green Fellows had strong points of view, but recently, they’ve been spreading the word. Two fellows were in the news in the past week with opinion articles in the New York Times and the Huffington Post.

In “Workers Without Borders,” featured in the New York Times, 1992 Echoing Green Fellow Jennifer Gordon writes that, despite sentiment to the contrary, now is the most urgent time to consider immigration reform. Jennifer argues that the current system is detrimental to wages across the board, not just for immigrants. She advances a plan called Transnational Labor Citizenship, which would involve migrants working legally in the U.S. as long as they promise to report employers that violate labor laws.

2008 Echoing Green Fellow Elizabeth Scharpf’s article, “When a Period Ends More Than A Sentence,” was featured recently in the Huffington Post. Elizabeth, with collaborator Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, discusses the problems tied to the lack of affordable sanitary supplies for girls and women in developing countries. UNICEF states that “ten percent of school-age African girls miss school because of a lack of access to affordable sanitary products.”  Also, there are serious health problems that can stem from the lack of pads and tampons.

Read both of the articles and give us your opinion in the comments section.