SAN FRANCISCO, California — As I strolled the beautifully
landscaped green of the San Francisco City Hall plaza awaiting the
thousands en route with the Labor Day Immigrants Rights March, a
cheery young woman bounded out from behind booth of the Freedom
Socialist Party — the “Voice of Revolutionary Feminism” — to pass
along a flyer headlined, “Love Knows No Borders: Unite to Defend
Queer and Immigrant Rights.” Further down, a little cartoon man
held a sign advocating, “Free love, not free trade.”
“We’re not separatists,” she assured me. “You could join.”
Even as I demurred a volunteer from A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to
Stop War & End Racism) thrust a handbill at me for an upcoming
screening of the documentary Fidel, which promises “rare
footage” of El Comandante “swimming with his bodyguards” — Love
Knows No Borders, indeed.
Like a movie star whose Hollywood cachet you can track by the
ebb and flow of his entourage, the number of political hangers-on
at the San Francisco march clearly demonstrated the ascendancy of
the immigration rights movement. As with any other hangers-on, the
people trying to cop a ride on the immigrant rights movement’s
coattails have their own agendas — agendas that are not
necessarily a boon to the cause.
Walking the green that morning you could pick up Workers
Vanguard, Socialist Worker, Socialist
Appeal, all from all the various groups vying to be the
Official Vanguard of the Revolution. Gray Panthers and Dykes Across
Borders were on hand. The Spartacus Youth League passed out
excerpts from Leon Trotsky’s “To the Spanish Youth”: Trotsky may
have written, “The study of Marxism outside the revolutionary
struggle can create bookworms but not revolutionaries,” but those
content to be bookworms could pick up Castro’s War, Racism, and
Economic Justice: The Global Ravages of Capitalism or Cuba
at the Crossroads.
Meanwhile, the Haymarket Books tent was selling “We are all
Palestinians” T-shirts — silhouette of a young man throwing a rock
— which was strangely appropriate since the literature castigating
the Zionist Entity outnumbered amnesty/immigration rights pamphlets
by at least ten to one. A man peddling Mexican flags had few
takers. There was one booth dedicated to registering recent
immigrants. The first question on the lips of nearly every other
booth table jockey was some variation of, “So do you have any
interest in the wider movement?”
The starkest example I saw of how disconnected the activists
attempting to co-opt immigration for their own ends were from those
they were ostensibly there to help was a middle-aged white woman
standing in the midst of arriving Hispanic marchers waving mostly
American flags — although some Mexican and El Salvadoran flags
fluttered in the breeze as well — with a sign hoisted above her
head reading, “Sensenbrenner, You Are an Extremist Jew!” Some
solidarity! I wonder which image will make it into the reactionary
blogosphere: The older female emigre from China sweetly attempting
to reassure her fellow citizens through a translator, “All new
immigrants are brave, hardworking and friendly” or the woman waving
around the anti-Semitic poster while the Chinese woman spoke?
OF COURSE, MOST WERE NOT as crass as all that, but there was
unfortunately plenty more on display that day to feed the Lou Dobbs
strain of dime-store demagoguery. The line-up of official speakers,
voices booming from loudspeakers and echoing off buildings, showed
a keen uninterest in using the platform of a large-scale media
event to reach out to a native population concerned about
widespread demographic changes. Instead of talk of reconciliation
or unity or compromise or even fairness, speaker after speaker
hammered away at the most divisive points in the debate.
“We are here and we will never leave and we demand
legalization,” one man said into the microphone, followed by a
Bayview woman who shouted, “You’re standing on your own land and
you can’t be illegal in your own country. This is your land you
don’t have to apologize for being here.”
In front of me a young couple gave their portraits of
conquistadors — “We Didn’t Cross the Border, The Border Crossed
Us” — a particularly vigorous shake.
“We need to let the language barriers go,” she continued. “We
all speak the same language — equality, justice for all
people.”
Yet every third line she had to stop for a translator.
BY THE TIME A REPRESENTATIVE from Filipinos for Affirmative Action
came up and a Mexican political activist got fired up about the
Zapatistas, it seemed everything had gone hopelessly off track.
“There is complicity among technocrats, the International
Monetary Fund, the global banks and the United States,” one speaker
railed, suddenly giving a rally for the compassionate treatment of
immigrants toiling in the United States had all the broad-based
consensus of the WTO riots. Gerald Lenoir from the Black Alliance
for Just Immigration followed this up, exclaiming, “We are fighting
against the same racist system. We are fighting against the same
corporate power. We are fighting the same right-wing conspiracy in
the United States.” And still more muddle from yet another speaker:
“We are all members of families of the world against globalization
fighting for a better life for grassroots communities.”
Globalization? Corporate power? The IMF? When did a freshman
sociology class take over the march? If this is a civil rights
movement, as organizers contend, they should be attempting to
broaden its appeal, not throwing an anchor of already marginalized
political stances around its collective neck.
There is no excuse for this lack of political diversity.
Certainly a significant amount of the anti-immigration rhetoric on
the right is reprehensible and without excuse. But if organizers of
this rally were looking to show a broad spectrum of support for
just, compassionate immigration reform and therefore be more
persuasive to body politic writ large — let’s grow up and accept
“No Borders, No State” and “Unconditional Legalization Now” are
nonstarters on any realistic level — they would attempt to engage
those outside their conspiracy theorist coterie. There are conservative and libertarian voices out there certainly willing to
accommodate them, perhaps even a voice from within the administration.
“We know we are scapegoated for all of the problems in society,”
Day Worker Center Director Maria Marroquin told the crowd. “But if
people understood our struggle they would be with us, because this
is a human struggle.”
Allowing a march to devolve into a circus where immigrant rights
become inextricably entangled with pet issues of the far left,
however, only serves to further convince those with conflicted
feelings about immigration that this categorically is not
their struggle.
Despite all the rhetoric, all this noise in the streets has
not significantly increased new voter
registration. The crowds at the Labor Day rallies were much smaller than those at the May Day marches
only last spring. It’s time for the immigration rights movement to
decide whether it wants to cast a wider net. As it stands now it
has more to fear from those desperate to associate attach
themselves as “friends” of the movement than it does from Pat Buchanan.
