Immigrant rights activists meet near Chicago

Some 325 immigrant rights delegates from 25 states met on August 11-13 in Hillside Ill., outside Chicago. The group named itself the “National Alliance for Immigrant Rights.”

Most of those attending were Mexican@s from Chicago’s March 10th Coalition, the group which initiated the massive immigrant rights marches in Chicago this spring. The group agreed on opposition to both congressional immigration bills, Sensenbrenner (HR4437) and Hegel-Martinez (S2611). Those at the conference said, “No law is better than a bad law” and opposed a guest worker program, immigrant detention centers and “English only” legislation. The conference called for a moratorium on deportations.

Nineteen Minutemen vigilantes stood outside the conference at one point, their racist, pro-slavery Confederate flags flying, their anti-immigrant signs resting on their paunches.

Former Young Lord Vincente “Panamá” Alba of New York’s May 1 Coalition added that the immigrant communities were facing serious crises in food and housing, raids and arrests by police and Immi gration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The Women’s Caucus resolution, unanimously accepted, called for a defense of the rights of women as workers and mothers. Women face exploitation as domestic workers, and confront the cruelty of the international sex trade, rape and brutality from police and the Border Patrol.

After a short struggle, resolutions supporting the Gulf Coast evacuees and against the war in the Middle East were passed. The resolution presented by New York and Los Angeles activists on Katrina reads in part: to “support the right of return, right to housing, and the right to jobs for African American, immigrant, and poor white workers, the survivors of Katrina and Rita, in the Gulf Region.”

A teacher from Los Angeles’ March 25th Coalition said, “To immigrant students nothing is given, but they sacrifice everything in wars for a government who despises them.”

Ignacio Meneses from Detroit said many immigrants in Michigan are people of Mid dle Eastern backgrounds, facing detentions and deportation every day. “Fail ure to oppose U.S./Israeli policies in the Middle East would be a betrayal of comrades in the struggle for immigrant rights.”

Meneses continued, “Immigrants don’t come to the U.S. looking for ‘democracy.’ They are looking to escape their econo mies, destroyed by U.S. commercial policies.” The case of Elvira Arellano and her young son Saúl epitomizes this.

The case of Elvira and Saúl Arellano

Elvira Arellano was “driven to come to this country by the economic policies of the United States.” Arellano said she is an activist with Pueblo Sin Fronteras, which organizes families with U.S. citizen children facing separation by deportation. She went seven times to Washington, D.C., to testify before Congress, putting family unity at the center of the immigration debate. She mobilized a mass protest on July 5, 2005, in Chicago, a demonstration that drew 50,000 people. She helped form the Coalition for African Asian Arab European Latino Immigrants of Illinois (CAAAELII).

ICE called her and ordered her to pack her bags and report for deportation.

She called on everyone at the conference to pick up their cell phones and lodge protests with Senators Dick Durbin and Barack Obama. They did.