By Paul Nachman
05/02/2011
It’s May Day, 2011, time for the annual inspiring street action on behalf of cruelly victimized illegal aliens, along with more generalized spluttering:We encourages everyone to actively linking our issues with different struggles: wars in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine & Korea with sweatshops exploitation in Asia as well as in Los Angeles, New York; international arm sales and WTO, FTAA, NAFTA & CAFTA with AIDS, hunger, child labors and child solider; as well as multinational corporations and economic exploitation with racism and poverty at home–in order we can win the struggle together at this May Day 2011!That eloquent call-to-arms is from the May Day 2011 organizing page of the Immigrant Solidarity Network.
The page also includes their usual list of demands:
1. No to anti-immigrant legislation, and the criminalization of the immigrant communities. 2. No to militarization of the border. 3. No to the immigrant detention and deportation. 4. No to the guest worker program. 5. No to employer sanction and “no match” letters. 6. Yes to a path to legalization without condition for undocumented immigrants NOW. 7. Yes to speedy family reunification. 8. Yes to civil rights and humane immigration law. 9. Yes to labor rights and living wages for all workers. 10. Yes to the education and LGBTQ immigrant legislation.It always seems worthwhile to point out that demands #2 and #6, taken together, imply that not only do they want amnesty even for those who jumped the border five minutes ago, they want the illegal flow to continue unimpeded.
(In this year’s decalogue-of-demands, they don’t actually use the word "amnesty." That apparently happened last in 2006, when the sixth item in their list was "Yes to amnesty for undocumented immigrants.")
Apparently the inspiration didn’t suffice this year, which is too bad, since it’s always helpful for the patriotic cause of squelching immigration to have legions of these "in the shadows" people waving Mexican and Central American flags in the faces of otherwise-oblivious American citizens.
That conclusion is based upon checking the websites of the newspapers in New York City, Denver, Dallas, Tucson, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. As of 3 p.m. Mountain Time, the only report of today’s activities I've found is a brief item, Small turnout for May Day March, by Sam Quinones at the LA Times’s site. Quinones writes, in part:
By 10 a.m. only a few hundred immigrant rights and labor activists had gathered at Broadway and Olympic Boulevard in downtown Los Angeles to rally public support for legislation that would legalize the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants.So today’s festivities in Los Angeles qualify as a damp squib for the cause of destroying America via mindless immigration."It’s really sad," Luis Ortiz, an ice cream vendor who has been coming to the rallies for the last 15 years, said of the small turnout. "I've sold very little, almost nothing."
On the other hand, the Quinones article also contains an implicit warning for patriots:
Sunday’s turnout was a far cry from the excitement and unity that infused the May Day march in 2006, when hundreds of thousands of people marched through downtown Los Angeles.Since then, activists have deemphasized street actions in favor of change at the ballot box through promoting citizenship and voter registration.
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