This morning the House Judiciary Committee kicked off their first hearing on immigration reform and it’s a great opportunity to remind folks invested in this topic to utilize our Scout project to track developments. I’ve pulled together a number of terms relating to immigration into this public collection to help you find when they appear in state or federal legislation, speeches in Congress, regulations and more.

To create this public collection, I simply created individual alerts for terms I knew related to immigration. These included general phrases like “immigration” or “naturalization” and more technical terms like “I-130” (the form to petition for relatives to receive U.S. lawful permanent residence) and commonly discussed legislation like the “DREAM Act.” I tagged all these alerts with “immigration” that then creates a private collection of the terms you’ve tagged. I incorporated the RSS feed of Sunlight blog posts tagged as immigration, hit the “Make Collection Public” button and added a brief description of the collection. Now anyone can follow all the terms I’ve made or click through to each term and fine tune what they get alerts about. This is a great way to encourage folks to follow terms you’re interested in and help others track the actions of government.