As part of IMMIGRANTS OCCUPY, Immigrant Movement International’s December 18 call for actions for International Migrant’s Day , Ghana ThinkTank posted Guerilla bus ads promoting the benefits Immigrants bring to our country.

This action came out of a summer collaboration with Immigrant Movement International/ Tania Bruguera that dealt with the divide between the old guard of Immigrants to Corona (mostly Italian) and more recent newcomers (mostly Latino).

In brief, we asked people who had issues with the latest wave of Immigration to Corona to help us craft a pro-Immigrant advertising campaign.

We started by pairing slogans created at an Immigrant Movement International workshop with images of early Italian Immigrants to the USA, and set up focus groups around these images and slogans.

We then presented the same slogans again, but paired with Latino imagery, and once again discussed the meaning of the slogans. The workshops allowed us to bridge the Immigration experience between the old guard and the newcomers, and resulted in pro-Immigrant ads crafted by those same people who had issues with the new waves of Immigration in their communities.

We then printed these ads to MTA Bus guidelines, and pasted them on several bus lines that connected the old and new waves of Immigrants in Corona.

On December 18, we re-staged the Advertisement Occupations in support of Immigrant Movement International’s International Migrant Day Actions.