Friday, May 05, 2006

Who's Missing from the Immigration Marches?

Here's the article I have been wanting to write. In Milwaukee it's the same story. The marches are overwhelmingly working class Mexican families with few others there in solidarity.

Slideshow from the Milwaukee rally.

"Lefties from the Troops Out Now Coalition (a spin-off of Ramsey Clark's International Action Center ) may have helped pull the event together with immigrant groups on a shoestring budget of $10,000. But the bulk of the crowd was brought in by word of mouth and flyers printed up by neighborhood activists in Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Russian, French, Creole, and Urdu.

Whole families marched together, mothers pushing strollers and older kids who skipped school to link up with their parents (attendance was down by about 10 percent in city high schools). The majority of protesters were Mexican, but there were many other Latin Americans, Africans, Asia

If there was a demographic slice missing it was the corps of white peaceniks who'd paraded down Broadway on Saturday. That protest felt a bit like a roving street fair with colorful signs and the habitual entertainers--Billionaires for Bush, Missile Dick Chicks, big puppets--along with a group posing as Muslim detainees in prison garb, dragging a guy in a cage."

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