Thanks to your participation, we managed to do something really incredible on Twitter: we turned our #18MillionHearts for Immigration Reform chat into a U.S. trend!
As far as we know, no group of rabble-rousing, quick-witted AAPIs talking about immigration has ever trended on Twitter – that is, until together we knocked the trend machine out of the park on Wednesday and ended up in Twitter jail for maxing out our allotted number of hourly tweets.
But more important than temporarily elbowing Paris Hilton off her pink Twitter throne, #18MillionHearts for Immigration Reform inspired 1,076 tweets by AAPIs in ONE DAY – letting the world know that our voices cannot be ignored. These 1,000-plus tweets highlighted key immigration issues that impact us: family reunification, equal rights for LGBTQs, intersectionality, border security, and love for one another and our communities. That was our win this week.
And if for some reason you couldn’t join us for the Twitter chat, you can get a really great overview of the conversation by checking out #18MillionHearts for Immigration Reform on Storify.
So from the bottom of our hearts, we thank you. We thank you for your unwavering efforts to fight for immigration reform that keeps AAPI communities as whole and vibrant as possible. We thank you for continually elevating AAPI voices nationally and in your own local community. And we thank you for being such a supportive friend to 18MillionRising.
We encourage you to continue using #18MillionHearts on Twitter. We plan to keep the hashtag alive and hope you do, too. (As of Wednesday, May 22, our hashtag has been seen by over 3 million people!).
We can’t wait to collaborate with you again on our next big social media adventure. You can stay up to date with 18MR and the fight for immigration reform on Facebook.
C.M. Samala is Director of 18MR.org
