National Day of Action for Immigrant Justice
Today is the National Day of Action for Immigrant Justice. There are major marches in Washington DC and a host of other cities. I wanted to go - I planned to go - but I've been sick all weekend, and it's probably the fucking flu. I have a doctor's appointment at 4pm, and I'll find out. Meantime, the show goes on. The Washington Post has an article with a route map. They're expecting as many as 180,000 people. If you are in the DC area and want to go, you can either meet up at Meridian Hill Park (aka Malcom X Park) before the 3:00 step-off - an email I got from PFAW had a call time of 2:00 pm - and march down 16th street, or meet the group at the Washington Monument around 4:00 or 4:30.
I want to talk a little bit about why this is an important issue. For anyone who has a doubt that racism is at the heart of this fuss over "illegals" I want to tell a story. Immigration was something of an issue during the 2005 governor's campaign in Virginia. I worked for the coordinated campaign for a few months, and canvassed every day. In certain areas - invariably the most McMansiony areas, mostly in and around Herndon, I started to find people who would name "Illegal Immigrants" as their issue. In Herndon at the time there was a big fuss over a day-labor center that had been proposed as a place where day laborers could gather, to prevent them gathering at gas stations and the like, which the property and business owners did not care for.
"Immigration" wasn't as big an issue as "Traffic" which was far and away the #1. But I got enough of this that I, and other canvassers, started to bug the higher-ups for talking points on "Immigration." Canvassers are very loathe to improvise, you see, because we get that instinct beat out of us very early on in our field careers. It's a very uncomfortable thing as a field staffer to be asked a question over and over that you haven't been given a ready answer to.
I was made all the more uncomfortable by the fact that I sensed that the real concern with "Illegal Immigrants" was something more along the lines of "I don't want those brown people living in my neighborhood." Then one day I had this confirmed for me in beautiful clarity. I was in a neighborhood of townhomes in Herndon. It looked like a nice neighborhood, a comfortable one, not upscale, but hardly a place where poor folk could afford to live. About half the residents (who answered the doors) were white, and about half were Hispanic. I'd been there for an hour or two when I knocked on the door of a white woman.
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