Wishful thinking
05/04/2006
For the second time in just more than a month, thousands of people — legal and illegal immigrants as well as regular citizens supportive of their plight — took to the streets of cities around the country in largely peaceful demonstrations aimed at illustrating just how important immigrants really are to our society.
One had only to drive around Los Angeles Monday to see what impact thousands of people taking the day off from work and school had on regional freeway traffic, which rolled along unimpeded most of the day at weekend and holiday levels.
It was not immediately known how much revenue was lost from people participating in a nationwide boycott of all consumer goods on this Day Without an Immigrant, as organizers dubbed the May Day event.
But we do know that some people sacrificed a day’s pay, if not their jobs, to participate with thousands upon thousands of others — nearly a half-million people alone converged on parts of downtown Los Angeles in two separate events — to voice opposition to plans in Congress to arrest and then deport illegal immigrants back to their nations of origin and to build a 700-mile fence along the border with Mexico.
We also know that thousands of public school students took off Monday to join in the marches — some 35 percent of all secondary students in Pasadena.
The question now is: Was it all worth it? Did all the marching, singing and slogan chanting have the desired result, which was to bring attention to the draconian anti-immigration legislation being considered and highlight all the contributions immigrants make to our economy, our society and our lives? Certainly they were seen, but were they heard?
For those who were already sympathetic with the cause of undocumented immigrants — an estimated 11 million currently living in the US — and those now-legal immigrants who have gone through all the many hoops that the federal government puts in front of them in order to become citizens, the answer is an unqualified yes.
But what about the others, those people — represented in part by the likes of CNN’s conservative commentator Lou Dobbs — who are convinced that illegal immigration is one of the greatest scourges to hit the United States in many years and want illegal immigrants arrested and shipped out of the country?
And what about our lawmakers? Did they see and hear what was being said about them and their ideas to stem the tide of illegal immigrants flowing into the US? Did the protesters reach them?
Again, the answer is yes; but they appear to remain largely unimpressed, if not all the more infuriated.
"When the rule of law is dictated by a mob of illegal aliens taking to the streets, especially under a foreign flag, then that means the nation is not governed by a rule of law — it is a mobocracy," Jim Gilchrist, a founder of the Minutemen Project, a volunteer group that patrols the United States-Mexico border, told New York Times reporter Randal C. Archibald.
Even so, for people like Gilchrist, Dobbs and the Republican members of Congress currently backing anti-people immigration legislation, things really could have been worse. Monday could have been an election day and all those people could have been taking the day off to vote.
If or when that happens, maybe we won’t need to hold another Day Without an Immigrant for the most politically vulnerable among us to be seen and heard.
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT