The New York Times
12 Apr 2010
NEW YORK: Thousands of immigrants gathered Saturday for rallies in seven cities to press Congress and the Obama administration to go ahead this year
with legislation to give legal status to millions of illegal immigrants.
Organisers planned the demonstrations – on the last weekend before lawmakers return to Washington after a recess – to follow up on a big rally held March 21 in Washington. They are battling to keep an immigration overhaul on Congress’ agenda, even as the political odds appear to worsen almost daily.
The prospects for Congress to take up the volatile immigration issue dimmed as the debate over health care legislation consumed lawmakers’ attention, and now it is clear that the Obama administration will focus this summer on winning confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee to succeed Justice John Paul Stevens.
The largest rallies were set for Saturday afternoon in Las Vegas and Seattle, in an effort to draw immigrants and advocates who could not travel to the Washington march. In Las Vegas, organisers said they hoped to show greater numbers than the several thousand conservative Tea Party members who rallied last month in Searchlight, Nev.
Sen. Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader who is facing a difficult re-election campaign in Nevada, agreed to address the crowd in Las Vegas. Latino voters, whose numbers in Nevada have been growing rapidly and who strongly favor the immigration overhaul, were crucial to President Barack Obama’s upset victory there in 2008.
In the last week, some immigrant advocates have become openly angry with the Obama administration, saying it has continued to pursue tough enforcement policies leading to thousands of deportations, but has made no progress on legislation to open a path to legal status for illegal immigrants. The advocates said they were reacting to news reports that agents were working to meet deportation quotas after senior immigration officials had said they were no longer guided by such numerical goals.
In several California cities, members of the Service Employees International Union, one of the largest labor organizations supporting the immigration overhaul, protested Thursday and Friday in front of immigration agency offices.
Eliseo Medina, an executive vice president of the union, said the group had been expecting Obama to shift enforcement policy after the high-profile workplace raids of the Bush administration. But Medina said thousands of immigrants in the union who do not have work authorization had been fired from jobs in recent months while deportations continued.
“It’s pretty clear that our optimism about a change of policy was misplaced,” Medina said in an interview. “What they are doing makes no sense, so we are just basically mobilizing to fight back.”
Speakers at the Las Vegas rally included top leaders of the AFL-CIO and of Unite Here International, two major labor federations. Immigrant groups said they were holding smaller rallies on Saturday in Chicago, El Paso, New York City, Philadelphia and Providence.
Advocates said they would continue to push for immigration legislation this year because they feared that it would become more difficult if Republicans made significant gains in the midterm elections. The overhaul they are seeking would include measures on legalization and border security and changes to the legal immigration system, which is widely regarded as broken.
While President George W Bush and many Republicans supported legalization measures in past years, opposition to those provisions has increased sharply among conservative Republican voters, who say they reward lawbreakers with amnesty.
At the same time, more support for the measures has come from Christian evangelical churches, which include many conservative members. Several Christian pastors said Friday that they would unveil a strategy this week to build support among churches for the overhaul.
“Our strategy is to show this as a true moral issue,” said Jim Tolle, senior pastor of the Church on the Way, a large evangelical church in Van Nuys, Calif. “The instructions in the Bible are toward the foreigner, toward helping the stranger,” he said. One group in the campaign is the National Association of Evangelicals, which includes thousands of churches.
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