People Power
The marchers in white T-shirts poured out of the subway doors and merged into a stream, flowing like blood cells through the tubular innards of the Washington Metro, past turnstiles and up escalators and out into the delicate brilliance of a fine spring day. On the street, they met up with the others — young parents, old people, toddlers in strollers, teenagers in jeans and jewelry — and headed to the Mall, where they and their American flags dissolved into a shimmering sea of white, red and blue.
The immigration rallies of recent weeks have drawn an astounding number of people around the country: Monday's "national day of action" was attended by an estimated 180,000 in Washington, 100,000 each in Phoenix and New York City, 50,000 each in Atlanta and Houston, and tens of thousands more in other cities.
Adding in the immense marches last month in Los Angeles and Chicago, the immigrants and their allies have carried off an amazing achievement in mass political action, even though many of them are here illegally and have no right to vote. Whether the rallies leave you inspired or unnerved, they are impossible to ignore.
This nation is deeply divided and undecided about illegal immigration. The ambivalence runs deep. Americans can hardly even agree on whom they are talking about. Listen to debates from talk radio to the Senate, and you will hear utterly incompatible descriptions of the same group of people. The nation's 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants are either an occupying army of thieves, snatching jobs and subverting our laws, or they are a wholesome community of strivers, eager to build families and chase the American dream.
Monday's rallies were a decisive victory for the more positive vision. In Washington, as elsewhere, the mood was as mellow as the crowd, which was dominated by parents of young children. (You can shout all the fiery slogans you want, but you will never be threatening with a baby in your arms.) An 86-year-old Salvadoran, Maria Guevara, sat in a folding chair and waved a plastic American flag as a friend, Ana Santos, held a placard to keep the sun out of her eyes. Ms. Guevara was as placid as if sitting beside a pond, though all around her it was noisier than a baseball stadium.
A recurrent complaint against new immigrants — particularly Latinos, the overwhelming majority at most rallies — is that they are slow to assimilate. But these crowds clearly had internalized at least one pillar of the American way: that peaceful dissent can spur a government to action.
Though recent immigration developments in Washington had been a discouraging mix of stalemate and cold political maneuvering, the marchers seemed motivated less by a sense of grievance than by hope, and the pure joy of seeing others like themselves rallying for a precious cause. They were venturing boldly from the shadows and daring the country to change its laws, but were doing so out of a desire to participate in the system, not to undermine it.
This became especially clear when the thousands on the Mall recited the Pledge of Allegiance, reading from yellow sheets printed in English and in a crude phonetic spelling to help Spanish speakers pronounce the unfamiliar words. Something about the latter version — with its strange sense of ineloquent desire — was enough to provoke tears.
Ai pledch aliyens to di fleg
Of d Yunaited Esteits of America
An tu di republic for wich it estands
Uan naishion, ander Gad
Indivisibol
Wit liberti an yostis
For oll.
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MESSAGE OF SOLIDARITY TO THE IMMIGRANT WORKERS
ON THE DAY OF THE GREAT AMERICAN BOYCOTT 2006
By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson, International Coordinating Committee
International League of Peoples' Struggle
April 30, 2006
We, the International League of Peoples' Struggle, hereby express our
solidarity with and support for the millions of immigrant workers on the day
of the Great American Boycott 2006 when they and their supporters do not go
to work, to school or to any shop but hold protest marches and rallies
against institutions and symbols of anti-immigrant discrimination,
exploitation and oppression in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, San Jose, San
Francisco, Seattle and 100 cities all over the US.
We join the call for amnesty and full rights for the undocumented immigrant
workers who are estimated to be 12 million, mainly from Latin America and
Asia in terms of global regions and from Mexico, China and the Philippines
in terms of countries. By dint of hard work, mostly at bottom jobs, they
contribute significantly to the US economy and to the well-being of the
American people.
They must have the right to reside and other rights in the US. They must
benefit from their own social contributions (in tax and social insurance
payments). They must be relieved of the anxieties from attempts to
criminalize them, subject them to racial discrimination, keep them down at
bottom jobs and low wages and to blame them for the socio-economic crisis
that the monopoly capitalism inflicts on the American people.
The US monopoly capitalists are the most rabid exponents of the freedom of
movement of capital, especially their exploitative kind of capital extracted
from the working people.
The original source of capital, which is labor, should also have the freedom
of movement on a global scale. It is certainly unjust for the imperialists
of obstacles to the migrant workers in the global market.
If there is really free trade within North America, why put up walls between
the US and Mexico? The lopsided relationship of the US and Mexico becomes
more obviously unjust when we recall that so many large states originally
belonged to Mexico and were grabbed by the US by force of arms and
chicanery.
We call on all participating organizations of the ILPS in the US to join and
support the mass actions on the Day of the Great American Boycott 2006. We
also call on all other ILPS participating organizations, while celebrating
May 1 as the International Workers' Day, to express solidarity with and
support for the immigrant workers in the US in their struggle for amnesty
and full rights.###
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