Immigrant freedom riders cross the country
By Leslie Feinberg
On Sept. 20, some 900 immigrant workers and
their supporters boarded buses in Seattle, Portland, Ore., San
Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Chicago,
Houston, Miami and Boston. They are traveling 20,000 miles of
U.S. highways to stop at more than 100 cities and towns to
educate and agitate for immigration reform. Others joining
along the route are swelling their numbers.
The four stated goals of this dramatic action are:
legalization and a road to citizenship for all immigrant
workers in this country, the right to reunite families,
protection of workers' rights on the job without regard to
legal status, and protection of the civil rights and civil
liberties of all.
The riders will join an expected crowd of tens of thousands
on Oct. 4 for a massive rally in Queens, N.Y. The borough is
home to immigrants from around the world.
Debbie Timko, president of statewide Local 150 of the
Service Employees Union in Minnesota, said, "The goal is to get
white, non-union members to see that corporate greed is eroding
their economic status as surely as it is enslaving vulnerable
immigrant workers."
Freedom Ride sponsors include some powerful unions within
the AFL-CIO, among them the Hotel and Restaurant Employees, the
Service Employees, and the United Farm Workers.
This Freedom Ride was inspired by Black and white
civil-rights activists who traveled to the South in the 1960s
to overturn Jim Crow segregation.
Now, as then, armed authorities are being used as a weapon
to attempt to turn back this social progress.
In El Paso, Texas, for example, U.S. Border Patrol officials
stopped two buses carrying close to 100 of the Freedom Riders.
The riders were ordered off the buses and interrogated.
But the civil-rights activists held up the printed cards
that each is carrying. The card explains that they are
exercising their right to remain silent, that they do not
consent to being searched and will not give up any of their
rights, and provides the contact information for their
lawyers.
Hilda Delgado, a Freedom Ride spokesperson, refused to say
if any of the individuals on the bus were undocumented. Instead
she stressed that the people on the bus represent 10 million
undocumented immigrants who contribute some $730 million each
year to the U.S. economy.
'Si, se puede!'
Racists are attempting to organize opposition to the Freedom
Ride in cities and towns along the route. But in every reported
instance, big crowds of cheering supporters have overwhelmingly
outnumbered these handfuls of anti-immigrant forces, including
Nazi and Klan organizations.
Support rallies are braiding together local organizing
demands with the civil-rights trek's goals.
In Phoenix on Sept. 23, a boisterous crowd estimated by
police at 500 greeted the Freedom Riders with thunderous
cheers. "Si se puede!" chanted union workers and community
members at the rally. "It can be done" is the motto of the
migrant workers' struggle.
The Smithfield Packing Co., touted as the biggest
pork-packing plant in the world, was the target of a support
rally in Fayetteville, N.C. Latino immigrants make up much of
the plant's work force of 5,000. The hundreds at the rally,
including many Smithfield workers, denounced Smithfield bosses
for illegally firing employees for union activity. Members of
the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees
also took part in the rally.
In Atlanta, some 5,000 people marched with the Freedom
Riders from the Catholic Mission in Doraville--a working-class
suburb with a big immigrant population from Latin America and
Asia--to the Auto Workers Local 10 union hall.
The march was loud and enthusiastic, punctuated by chants in
Spanish, cheering, and guitar and drum music.
Organizers from Coordinadora de Lideres Comunitarios de
Atlanta, a group led mostly by women, raised the demand of
their local struggle to make driver licenses available for
immigrant workers without Social Security numbers.
The multinational crowd, which included many Black and white
union workers, so exceeded the union hall's capacity that
organizers had to bring the sound system outside and hold the
rally in the parking lot.
Many lined up for leaflets publicizing the Oct. 25 anti-war
protest in Washington, D.C., and some held up the fliers
demanding "Bring the troops home now!" like posters as they
marched.
Reprinted from the Oct. 9, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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