Question:
Immigration Protests Signal New Civil Rights Movement?
Answer:
Recent protests in the United States
against proposed immigration reforms considered anti-immigrant mark
the rise of a new American civil rights movement, according to protest
organizers. A news item carried by the progressive news service
OneWorld.net. says that the ultimate impact on the immigration debate
remains to be seen. Mass protests leading up to the March 2003
invasion of Iraq failed to dissuade legislators from giving President
George W. Bush the power to take the nation to war.
Protest organizers said their efforts played a large part in
persuading the Senate Judiciary Committee to approve a more
immigrant-friendly bill on Monday than the one put forward previously
by the House of Representatives.
Partha Banerjee, executive director of the New Jersey Immigration
Policy Network, said the ongoing protests can have a greater impact
yet because, like the struggle for civil rights in the mid-1900s, they
represent the interests of not just one minority but all migrant
groups. She told OneWorld that "this is so effective because this is
really a new civil rights movement reborn in this country." And she
added that the struggle is not just about immigrants, but about human
and civil rights of the "under-privileged people in the United
States."
Last December, the House of Representatives passed the Border
Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of
2005, legislation that critics said would slam the hopes of immigrant
rights advocates and the country's 11 million-odd undocumented
workers. The Senate Judiciary Committee approved a much more
immigrant-friendly version of the legislation Monday.
Before the Senate panel voted, more than 500,000 protesters took to
the streets of Los Angeles, 300,000 rose up in Chicago, and thousands
more marched, went on work-and-spending strikes, or even hunger
strikes across the country, according to Banerjee and other protest
organizers.
OneWorld.net news service says that while most of those involved in
the larger demonstrations appeared to be Latino, their views resonate
with large majorities of legal immigrants, according to a nationwide
survey conducted by private pollsters and released by California-based
New America Media (NAM), an association of more than 700 ethnic
newspapers and broadcast outlets.
Pollsters canvassed a representative sample of 800 of the 26 million
U.S. residents who have gained legal entry and found that most
strongly opposed Congressional proposals to criminalize and deport
undocumented immigrants and authorize walls and other barriers to be
built along the U.S.-Mexican border.
Members of all immigrant communities also voiced alarm over what they
termed growing anti-immigrant sentiment throughout the country,
according to the survey co-sponsored by the Center for American
Progress and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund.
Banerjee, with the New Jersey Immigration Policy Network, said
immigrants also had found strong allies among church and labor groups.
Some of these, she added, worked closely with her organization to
assemble some 200 clergy from various denominations, and more than one
thousand community leaders, on Capitol Hill earlier this week to voice
their support for immigrant rights.
Protesting with Mexican flags and posters claiming that this is their
continent and their land don't help their cause.
The African-AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS movement was just that -----FOR
AMERICAN CITIZENS. These ILLEGAL TRESSPASSERS & SQUATTERS IMO, HAVE NO
RIGHTS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Remember "No Irish Wanted Here", "Keep Papists Out Of Our State", "Let the
Pollacks Go To Hell" & "No Women Suffrage"?
That's entirely different. The Irish, the Catholic and the women were
all here legally. Nobody ever considered bringing them in illegally
and then telling everybody else they had now had a right to work here.
Don't we have any Abrahms tanks in this country? Even some of the older
ones? All they have to do is run and be tanks
One guaranteed way to get the point across that we don't want any illegal
aliens demonstrating, en mass, and whining about their non-existent civil
rights is to run them over with some tanks. The Chinese showed us this is a
great way to get things back in perspective.
Sometimes you just got to be firm when you want to impress folks. Our
current political leaders are not very firm and are basically appeasers of
the worst kind. Just look at what the weasels did today.
So much for the new American civil rights movement. The left is just
slobbering to get itself into the role of champion of the civil rights of
illegal aliens. Patriotic Americans can can take care of them, too, by
hog-tying a lot of them on the front glacis of the tanks, then cut them
loose as the tank wades into the demonstrators.
We will need a whole new set of politicans, too. Folks just got to
understand this is a low-level war, against us.
