Immigrants display boldness in U.S. rallies
By Maria Newman The New York Times
TUESDAY, APRIL 11, 2006
WASHINGTON In rallies that appeared to exceed the expectations of organizers and the police, hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their supporters marched Monday in more than 100 cities across the United States, casting off the old fears of their illegal status to assert that they have a right to a humane life in this country.
Marches took place in Houston, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Atlanta, and in smaller communities like Hyde Park, New York, Garden City, Kansas, and Belle Glade, Florida. Some of the marchers invoked the tactics and slogans of the civil rights era, and others were trying out a new voice for an emerging constituency that has hidden from authority because of their lack of papers, afraid to speak up, willing to work for wages that American citizens will not accept.
The rallies, part of what some organizers were calling the National Day of Action for Immigrant Justice, began with a demonstration in Atlanta and continued in more than 100 cities, ending with marches in New York City and Washington.
Organizers say immigrants are no longer afraid to speak out about the proposed immigration bills in Congress that some of them find unfair to them.
"I think that the incredible turnout in places like Dallas is just reflective of the deeply felt sense in this country that we have a broken immigration system that desperately needs to be fixed," said Eliza Leighton of Casa of Maryland, an immigrant advocacy group that was one of the organizers of the Washington rally.
In Atlanta, a sea of demonstrators, most of them dressed in the white T- shirts that have become emblematic of the immigrant rights marches, moved along a two-mile, or three-kilometer, route, with marchers carrying signs about their rights and the competing bills in Congress.
Before the march began, the police said they expected it to draw a crowd of 40,000. Afterward, organizers said they believed the size of the crowd might have reached 80,000.
"We are in a situation that Rosa Parks was in several years ago: Enough is enough," said Fabián RodrÃguez, 38, who came from Mexico and now lives in the Atlanta suburb of Norcross and works as a landscaper. "I want things to work out in our favor, or we go back to our country. But we can't keep living the way it is now." They were supporting immigrant rights nationally and protesting state legislation awaiting Governor Sonny Perdue's signature that would require adults seeking many state-administered benefits to prove they are in the country legally.
On Sunday, hundreds of thousands marched in Dallas, San Diego, Miami, Birmingham, Alabama and Boise, Idaho.
In Congress, an effort to enact the most sweeping immigration changes in two decades was derailed Friday by feuding over amendments and other issues. That came after a bipartisan Senate compromise last week that Democrats and Republicans hailed as a breakthrough. The Senate bill would open doors to citizenship for most illegal immigrants if they paid fines and learned English. It would also create a guest worker program for 325,000 people a year to meet the needs of business, and would tighten border security to satisfy conservatives.
But the agreement fell apart just before Congress went off on a two-week break, casting its future in doubt.
Brenda Goodman contributed from Atlanta, Barbara Miner from Madison, Wisconsin, and Laura Griffin from Dallas.
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