>Wojtek posted a BBC story about immigrant rights march in New York
>City, which says "thousands" demonstrated. Commenting on the same,
>Democracy Now! says "tens of thousands" marched:
><http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/03/1318256>.
>Whichever figure you take, the turnout is a lot smaller than in LA.
>
>Also, anti-war demonstrations on 18-19 March this year had a couple
>of thousands demonstrating in New York City, which is in the same
>league as the demo in Columbus, Ohio and a lot smaller than the
>10,000-strong rally in Portland, Oregon.
>
>Whenever New York City has demos that consist of mainly New Yorkers,
>as opposed to "national" mobilizations that draw out-of-towners, New
>York City demos are a lot smaller than the ones in other big cities
>like Los Angeles and Chicago and even smaller cities like Portland
>and San Francisco.
>
>What's the matter with New York City?
In this case, there's just not much anti-immigrant fervor in NYC, at any level of society. Somewhere in today's NYT it's reported that should Rudy Giuliani run for president, he'd have trouble with the national Republican party over his friendliness towards immigrants (not to mention queers). And he's as right wing as they come in NYC. You'd have a hard time getting elected to anything if you lashed out against foreigners.
Also, we have a much more diverse immigrant population. Anti-immigrant fervor in Calif and the Southwest is heavily anti-Mexican. Here, we've got south Asians, east Asians, Africans, Caribbeans, etc. So the immigrant population in LA, for example, is a lot easier to mobilize.
It's sad that there weren't larger demos in solidarity with besieged immigrants elsewhere, but, as the man said, all politics are local.
Doug