Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Fed Up With Playing the Punching Bag for Xenophobes

According to police estimates, over 500,000 people in Los Angeles marched today to protest HR 4437, a nasty piece of nativist work passed last December by the House of Representatives. The bill makes it a felony crime to be within US borders without US approved documentation. It also authorizes the construction of 700 miles of wall along the roughly 2,000 mile US-Mexican border, an idea, it might be noted, for which historical precedents suggest very poor efficacy (I don't mean to equate Mexicans with any invading force, just point out to the conservative immigration strategists who do, and who think this wall is a good idea: give me a break). Oddly enough, the bill proposes no such wall along the Canadian border.

While the wall has gained the most attention in the justifiably offended Mexican press, the item which has gained similar attention in the American press is a definition of "alien smuggling" which would subject those who so much as take a wounded person found near the border to the hospital to a potential 5 year prison term. Humanitarian groups, and most prominently the Catholic Church, have denounced the bill for this morally grotesque provision, which literally makes it a crime to help someone. As a theological matter, the Catholic Church's concern is understandable, since the alien smuggling provisions read like a series of contradictions to the various biblical commandments regarding foreigners. See, e.g. Exodus 23:9: "Do not oppress the foreigners living among you. You know what it is like to be a foreigner. Remember your own experience in the land of Egypt." (Not that politically conservative evangelicals seem to trouble themselves with careful hermeneutics). As a side, political matter, when I saw the various pieces about Los Angeles Cardinal Mahony's call to priests and parishoners to disobey the law if it passes, I couldn't help but think "now, that would be an interesting case to see go before the new Supreme Court line-up." This is not stereotyping of the Catholic Justices on my part; Roberts has specifically said that he would recuse himself in a case where the law required a ruling that the Catholic Church might find immoral. Unfortunately, my concern over the bill becoming law outweighs my curiosity.

I was one of the 500,000 who marched today. Maybe you can spot me in the picture below:

Actually, I didn't make it as far as this intersection, since I was hobbling on a knee with seven or so stitches in it, following a dog attack while jogging yesterday. When I saw the overhead photo after returning home, I was astonished. From below, it looked like this:

Unfortunately, I was confined to taking pictures of the largest demonstration in Los Angeles history with my cell phone, since, as usual, I had forgotten a camera.

Many demonstrators carried flags, or wore them as capes. Most carried American flags or Mexican flags, or both, though I also recognized Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Puerto Rico, among others.

More than the flags, I was taken with the signs, in Spanish and English. Some mass-made ones specifically mentioned HR 4437, demanded general Amnesty for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in America, or declared an end to the topic with "America is a country made for immigrants. Period." Others were personal "I am not a criminal" or "I'm proud to be an immigrant." Some riffed on the historical irony of Anglo Americans calling indigenous or mestizo Mexicans, "aliens." 

I was particularly taken with the sign of these folks behind me, which might have been carried at one of the demonstrations my grandfather attended in the 1930s. The one on the left says, "Nobody should be criminalized for attempting to survive," while the one in the middle says, "The Masses Will Not Stand for Reactionary Bourgeois Attacks on Working Class." The right one said something or other about the Proletariat (not exactly precise, committed reporting, I know, but imprecision strikes me as appropriate for someone who uses the term "Proletariat" in his signage).

Demonstrators effectively filled downtown, but the center of the march was along Broadway. Those who know Los Angeles may appreciate the symbolic appropriateness of this route, where derelict Art Deco movie palaces abandoned in the middle of the last century now teem with immigrants' market stalls, selling everything from blue jeans to diamonds to mole negro. Perhaps no other street in Los Angeles makes so transparent Latinos' contribution to the economy as entrepreneurs and consumers.

As in many parts of Los Angeles, such as Koreatown, where I work, some store signs provided evidence of layers of immigration not easily decipherable at first glance. Is the "Casa India," at right, which serves "Indian and Mexican food," run by Indians catering to Mexicans, or Indians who immigrated from Mexico?

After joining the march for several blocks, my boyfriend and I veered off into the open-air Grand Central Market, where he ate some reputedly very good fish tacos (I didn't get a taste), and I had a delicious caldo de pescado, filled with fresh tasting fish, carrots, zuchinni, and cilantro. The market was swamped with an enormous variety of people, excited, serious, laughing, cheers occasionally erupting without an obvious trigger. I've never been more proud and happy to live in Los Angeles.

Comments

[Randy Newman]

I love L.A.! And I love immigrants standing up and saying we're not going to sit quietly and be scapegoated any more. Today's march was inspiring, a credit to the pugnacity of the demonstrators, and also to the 1st Amendment right to freely associate. Anna has done a great piece of blog reporting, particularly since it looks like at least some of the media got caught flat-footed on the story (except for the LAT). The NY Times still is running only the AP wire story as of midnight Saturday.

[hognfrog]

To bad you don't have enough sense to hold this protest in Mexico city and demand your goverment give you what you want.

[Ruchira Paul]

Anna:
Great reporting from the ground!

hognfrog:
Anna was protesting her own government's action. She is an American.

[Anna]

Thanks Ruchira, and thank you, especially, hognfrog: I can't think of a better demonstration of the anti-immigration constituency in the US. Really, you made my day. As a side note, even were I from Mexico, your suggestion would remain extremely silly and unhelpful, since Mexico City doesn't control US immigration policy. Of course, the last time I heard someone say, as you in effect have, "Go back to Mexico," the speaker was a redneck outside a bar in New Orleans, and the intended recipient was my then boyfriend, a South Asian Indian. That's some pretty clever company you have in your club.

[Joe]

Anna, I really enjoyed reading this post. Just thought I'd throw that out there.

[Ruchira Paul]

Along with the protests, it is incumbent upon us to address the "under the rug" aspect of illegal immigration in particular and poverty in general in the USA. The protests will not amount to much unless the issue of fair wages, benefits and working conditions too are addressed at the same time. I am all for liberalizing immigration laws but not in order to facilitate a slave culture.

Houston is teeming with so called "illegals". People grumble all the time about the cost of "supporting" them. Yet there is very little public protest here and the issue remains below the radar until a group of people are found dead at the back of a truck crossing the border. I am yet to see a black, white or native born American of any color (except an occasional student waiting tables) mowing lawns, cleaning house, clearing dishes at restaurants or building the vast number of new homes that are coming up overnight all over the ever expanding city limits of Houston. Business owners plead innocence because they never directly hire the laborers thus keeping their own hand "clean". The procurement is always through a "contractor" ("coyote?") in the language of business & law enforcement.

Progressive Indian American Woman writes in detail about the underbelly of this issue.

[Anna]

Thanks, Joe.

Ruchira, I completely agree with you. In fact, as we all know from the news, the most powerful boosters of relaxed immigration laws are business interests, with Bush as their struggling spokesperson trying to work the unconvinced populist-nativist elements in the Republican Party. On the flip side of the same coin, Left workers' rights supporters like Ralph Nader, as well as otherwise liberal African-American leaders, form unholy alliances with populist-nativist leaders like Pat Buchanan to restrict both immigration and free trade.

Beyond the failure to see immigrant Americans as Americans, what these factions at either end of the political spectrum miss, in my opinion, is that restricting immigration is neither necessary nor sufficient to support fair working conditions. As an economic question, it tends to (as it has) drive business overseas and increase the black market in immigrant labor. As a rights question, it wastes energy and resources that could otherwise be focused on increasing and enforcing workers' rights, and wrongly focuses the blame on workers rather than employers. In terms of fair wages, benefits, and working conditions, I don't care if an employer hires a citizen or an undocumented immigrant, so long as the worker is hired under fair terms. And in fact, forcing business to do so, through law enforcement and organizing, would take away the advantage of hiring undocumented immigrants.

I don't mean to sound "problem solved" pat; I recognize there are other complications, and no easy answers. But one thing seems pretty clear to me (and 'm sure we're in agreement on this): trying to solve the problem of international wealth disparities and labor competition by erecting punitive and physical walls against the "invading hordes" is both ineffective and un-American.

I will be interested to take a look at PIAW's thoughts on this complicated issue.

[Ruchira Paul]

This is indeed a very complicated issue to address to everyone's satisfaction.

One of the most interesting points that Anna raises (my daughter who was at the same march in L.A., made the same observation) is the lack of enthusiasm in the African American community, which for the most part is on the right side ("left") of most social issues.

Also interesting is the "strange bedfellows" syndrome that the immigration issue invariably gives rise to. Buchanan /Nader and Bush / liberals as Anna points out.

My own feeling here always goes to the matter of fair wages and worker benefits/ rights. It will indeed be interesting to see if wages are raised, whether native born Americans will still reject certain kinds of work. For example, I saw that in meat packing plants of Nebraska and Iowa, even with wages of $7 - 10 /hour (higher than minimum wage of the 90's) the plants were manned almost exclusively by immigrants from Mexico. Except of course for the supervisory positions. These jobs were traditionally held by Nebraskans of middle European descent - Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and to some extent, Germany . The most ironic thing that I observed was that at the Office of Immigration in Omaha which of course is a federal office, there were posters and electronic streaming tickers - advertizing jobs for meat packers ! Targeted of course at "legal immigrants" but nonetheless indicative of the unavoidable fact that the Nebraska boys were not rushing to do what their dads did.

Earlier I noted that there has been no protest in Houston despite a sizeable Latino and immigrant population here. I heard on the radio that students in several high schools walked out of their classes today to protest the proposed legislation.

What upsets me most though in this recent uproar is the way the Republicans are cynically exploiting this as a terrorist/security issue, now that the Iraqi vote getting bucket is leaking uncontrollably.

[Snave]

Great pictures, great post.

I find it sad that Americans have been conditioned to believe that if people are protesting about something, that makes them troublemakers, malcontents, terrorists, to be laughed at and dissed, whatever.

If Americans took a closer look at not just the fact that people are protesting, but at WHY they are protesting, our country would make social progress and there would be real social justice.

Empathy is something people like Anne Coulter, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh tend to discourage. They don't want us to think about the WHY, because if too many of us did, those jokers would be laughed off the air, and nobody would buy their books anymore. And I believe that is something toward which our great nation should aspire: to be a nation of questioning people, who question all things in an effort to learn as much as we can about an isue before making our decisions.

Mr. Bush, tear down this wall before it even gets built.

[Anna]

Thank you, Snave, for your thoughtful comment. I had a similar reflection at the demonstration: that I could think of no activity more in keeping with the purpose of the right "peaceably to assemble" under First Amendment, than a remarkably violence free march to let the House of Representatives know that a bill it had passed was not, in fact, representative of the will of the marchers.

In the summer of 2002, when I spent a great deal of time in the Library of Congress, I often admired the inscriptions on the walls, and pondered how foreign and frightening they ought to seem to the Coulters, Hannitys, and Limbaughs of the world, who pretend to love our "founding fathers," but who hate inquisitiveness and dissent. The anti-intellectual, anti-inquiry right would do well to contemplate some of these inscriptions:

"The people of every country are the only safe guardians of their own rights and are the only instruments which can be used for their destruction. It is an axiom in my mind that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, that, too, of the people with a certain degree of instruction."-- Jefferson

"Learned institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty & dangerous encroachments on the public liberty" --Madison

For more: http://www.loc.gov/loc/walls/

[meo]

I lived in a community populated by Mexican illegals working in fruit industry.

The towns were trashy. The houses were trashy. If it wasn't naiiled down, it was stolen by Mexicans. Everyone I knew who lived out of town were robbed. Drive-by shootings due to drug disputes were common. We finally escaped north. We will keep going north where it is cold and Mexicans do not want to live in order not to live near these people. The town we live near now is clean and quiet. Low crime. Gee, is it any coincidence that there are hardly any Mexicans here?????