Immigrant’s rights are workers’ rights

WW photo: Bob McCubbin

LOS ANGELES

Thousands came out Sept. 2 in Los Angeles for “The Great Labor March for Immigrant Workers and General Amnesty.” The March 25th Coalition sponsored and initiated the event, which honored Elvira Arellano, a Latina single mother living in Chicago and fighting deportation. Speakers and organizers all called for an immediate moratorium on deportation raids. As a demonstration of solidarity with Arellano and the special oppression facing all immigrant women in the United States, all speakers and chairs of the event were women.

—WW Los Angeles bureau

WW photo: Lou Paulsen

CHICAGO

In the Chicago area, labor and immigrant communities marked Labor Day with a rally of 3,000 at the Batavia office of U.S. Rep. Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House of Representatives. The demon strators called for legalization for undocumented immigrant workers.

The rally culminated a four-day, 47-mile march organized by the March 10 Movement (www.movimiento10demarzo .org) that began in Chicago’s Chinese community on Sept. 1. The march received extensive daily coverage from the Chicago area news media.

As many as 250 marchers walked the entire way, staying overnight at churches and, on the night of Sept. 2, at the Islamic Foundation in Villa Park. Hundreds more walked sections of the route and participated in daytime and evening rallies. A team of volunteers from unions such as the Service Employ ees and UNITE-HERE, churches and social-justice organizations arranged for water, meals and portable toilets to be available along the route, and followed the march with a fleet of support vehicles.

The march went through many heavily Latin@ communities of Chicago and its suburbs, such as Pilsen, Little Village, Cicero, and Melrose Park. They walked past homes, factories, golf courses and cornfields—all places where immigrants live and work. While some individuals along the route held up anti-immigrant signs, they were outnumbered by supporters who gathered spontaneously at intersections and in front of stores, like those who held up “Welcome to Batavia” signs on the last day.

The Sept. 4 rally was augmented by busloads of people from the Latin@ communities of Chicago, Aurora, and Elgin. The crowd filled the block in front of Hastert’s office. Further up the street, police set aside another city block for 150 anti-immigrant demonstrators from the Minuteman Project, who tried to drown out the rally by shouting vulgarities but completely failed.

While over 90 percent of the marchers were Latin@s, the Palestinian, Chinese, and other immigrant communities were also represented. Keeping morale high, the Il Kwa Nori (Work in Play) Poong Mul (traditional Korean percussion) troupe from the Korean American Resource and Cultural Center played throughout the four-day march.

As many as 200,000 Latin@s and immigrants live in the valley of the Fox River, 50 miles west of Chicago. Most live and work in industrial cities like Aurora and Elgin. Hastert, however, has located his Fox Valley office in the 93-percent-white upper-middle-class town of Batavia. Hastert’s 14th District spreads westward across the state to the Mississippi, including many white rural counties, with the effect of submerging the Latin@ workers’ vote.

Top march organizers emphasized an electoral orientation, repeating the slogan, “Today we march, tomorrow we vote!” It is not clear what this means in practice. Hastert, for example, with a carefully mapped district, the grateful support of the capitalist class and 40 times the campaign funds of his Democratic opponent, John Laesch, is almost certain to win. But Laesch does not support legalization anyway. The farthest he would go, he says, would be to allow undocumented workers who have been working in the United States for six years to apply for citizenship, if they pay a $2,000 fee and pass “a background check, English tests, civics tests and register for the selective service.” (www.john06.com) Most other Democratic candidates are no better, and many are worse.

But the marchers this weekend were clear about what they wanted: “¡Legalización! ¡Ahora, ahora, ahora!” This movement is growing and learning, and will find a way to get what it wants.

—Lou Paulsen

Photo: Carol Marley

CHARLOTTE, N.C.

Some 1,000 people, mostly Latin@s, rallied for immigrant rights in uptown Charlotte’s Marshall Park on Aug. 3. They chose Labor Day weekend to hold the action to point out that immigrants are laborers who built and continue to build the United States.

Participants want Congress to pass legislation that allows immigrants to stay in the United States and become citizens regardless of their “legal status.” They are opposed to enforcement-only legislation and deportations.

Charlotte is in Mecklenburg County. With U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick’s help, the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Department was recently given power to enforce immigration laws. Myrick also recently held an anti-immigrant forum at her nearby Gastonia, N.C., office.

The Labor Day immigrant-rights rally lasted several hours. Speakers from local organizations and several politicians addressed the crowd. The rally was organized by Communities For Comprehensive Immigration Reform, the same group that led the 10,000-strong May 1 action in Charlotte.

—David Dixon