May Day Illegal Immigrant Rallies a Bust

From the LA Times:

About 35,000 people turned out at two Los Angeles rallies, far fewer than the combined 115,000 that organizers had anticipated and greatly fewer than the roughly 650,000 who turned out at rallies last year.

Turnouts were light across the country compared to last year, when millions of marchers in 150 cities took to the streets.

Chicago — home of the original May 1 International Workers' Day more than a century ago — drew the largest crowd with 150,000, while New York’s rally drew only hundreds.

But a good time was still had by some:

In Los Angeles, after police tried to disperse demonstrators who had moved off the sidewalk onto Alvarado Street about 6 p.m., some of the few thousand participants still in the park started throwing plastic bottles and rocks at officers.

As the failure of these demonstrations show, the notion that the illegal alien cause represents an irresistible political tidal wave is one of the more derisible peddled by the media:

• — First, illegal immigrants aren’t supposed to vote.
• — Second, they aren’t very good at self-organizing and they aren’t very interested in public affairs. They tend to be much more wrapped up in the complicated dramas of their private lives.
• = Third, Hispanic citizens, who can vote, have quite ambivalent feelings about illegal immigration.

- Fourth, illegal immigrants lack talented leaders, as do Latinos in general. Indeed, despite all the moral failings of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Louis Farrakhan, you have to grant them that they are good at their jobs. They rouse rabbles with the best of them. You can’t say the same about the various self-appointed Hispanic leaders, none of whose names come to mind at the moment.