Massive protest in LA over anti-immigration proposals
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles Published: 27 March 2006
Los Angeles witnessed the biggest public protest in its history over the weekend as hundreds of thousands of peaceful demonstrators of all races thronged the downtown streets to demand justice and legal recognition for the country's 12 million undocumented immigrant workers.
The march, which far exceeded organisers' expectations and easily dwarfed anything seen during the civil rights movement or the Vietnam War, was a stunning slap in the face for the country's vocal anti-immigrant lobby and set the stage for what is likely to be an electric debate in the Senate this week on what may emerge as the main issue in November's mid-term elections.
Helicopter footage of the march showed demonstrators packed into as many as two dozen city blocks around Los Angeles's City Hall. Crowd estimates ranged from half a million to more than a million. The protesters chanted workers' rights slogans in English and Spanish, waved flags from America, Mexico, Guatemala and elsewhere, and showed the face of a joyously multicultural America very different from the predominantly white, often anger-tinged anti-immigration movement.
LA's mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, the son of Mexican immigrants and a former labour activist, told the crowd: "We cannot criminalise people who are working, people who are contributing to our economy and contributing to the nation."
The march cut across party and class lines, and included whites, Latinos and Asians. It was the largest of a series of protest marches to have taken place across the United States in the past few days, all of them called in reaction to a bill passed in the House of Representatives last December that would reclassify illegal immigrants as criminal felons and call for the construction of a 700-mile wall stretching a third of the way along the US-Mexico border between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.
That bill, written and supported by the House's radical brand of Republicans, was never likely to become law but was designed, in the run-up to the election, to appeal to the country's growing fear and resentment of an unprecedented influx of Mexicans and other foreign nationals.
Now, however, the immigration question risks creating damaging splits in an already fractured Republican Party. President George Bush is, unusually, on the moderate side of the debate, pushing for a guest-worker programme that would keep the immigrants coming in accordance with America's economic needs but end the cat-and-mouse games at the border that have led to 3,500 migrant deaths from exposure to the punishing desert climate in the past 12 years.
Some Republican Senators are as radical as their House counterparts, while others have put forward compromise proposals closer to Mr Bush's line.
The weekend demonstrations in LA and elsewhere highlight the political dangers of pushing the anti-immigrant line too far. Although more than 60 per cent of Americans say they want tighter policing of immigrant flows - something that has proved impossible to achieve in 12 years of growing militarisation along the border - Californian Republicans are all too aware of what happened a decade ago when they championed a ballot initiative denying education, health and other social services to undocumented workers and their children. Although the initiative passed, it was struck down by the courts and created so strong a backlash that the party has been consigned to minority status in the Golden State ever since.
In recent weeks, the Catholic Church has come down firmly on the immigrants' rights side of the debate. Local elected officials have delivered resounding speeches opposing the House Bill. Several cities have either passed resolutions resisting criminalisation of immigrants or offered themselves as immigrant sanctuaries if the bill ever makes it into law.