20,000 Rally For Comprehensive Immigration Reform; 200 Arrested in Civil Disobedience Action
Tuesday, October 8, 2013(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)
For several years now, Lisa Bergmann of
New Haven, Conn., has been anxious about many
of her Spanish-speaking friends and neighbors.
The former Unite Here member was one of more
than 20,000 people – including thousands of
unionists -- who marched down the Washington,
D.C., Mall yesterday to demand the U.S. House
immediately pass comprehensive immigration
reform.
Bergmann says
the danger to her friends is why she came to
the protest. “I’m a citizen. I don’t have
to worry,” she says. “But I worry
about a lot of my friends who are waiting to
get their papers. And I have friends who
are incarcerated” because they’re
undocumented. “And some are afraid to
drive” because police could stop them and
demand proof of legality – which they lack
– on pain of detention and
deportation.
Concerns like
that -- which would be alleviated, if not
ended, by comprehensive immigration reform --
brought the thousands to the Mall. And
200, including 90 union leaders and unionists,
went one step further at the end of the
half-day march: They engaged in peaceful civil
disobedience in front of the Capitol and got
arrested. Arrestees included Bergmann,
newly-elected AFL-CIO Executive Vice President
Tefere Gebre, Metro Washington Council
President Jos Williams, Communications Workers
(CWA) Secretary-Treasurer Annie Hall and
Political Director Yvette Herrera, The
Newspaper Guild’s President, Bernie Lunzer,
and Paul Booth, the top assistant to AFSCME’s
president, and AFT President Randi
Weingarten.
“I’m
not really worried about getting arrested,”
Hall said beforehand. “This reform is
long overdue. And it’s about people who
are coming to this country to seek and find
economic justice for themselves and their
families.”
Unions, led by
contingents from the Service Employees and
their Local 32BJ, the Laborers and Unite Here,
contributed a large share of the demonstrators.
Other unions represented included AFSCME,
the Communications Workers/TNG, Labors Council
for Latin American Advancement, AFT and the
United Farm
Workers.
The
rally, which went on with National Park Service
cooperation despite the federal government
shutdown, was a sea of colorful banners, flags,
T-shirts and signs, punctuated by strong
pro-reform speeches and lively music.
House
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., pledged
to use every method available to get a
comprehensive reform bill to a floor vote,
where all 200 Democrats and several dozen
Republicans would vote for it – over GOP
leaders’ opposition. “We have the
votes to pass the bill,” Pelosi declared.
The point of
the arrests and the D.C. march, just three days
after similar marches in more than 60 cities
nationwide, was to force the GOP-led U.S. House
to bring that comprehensive immigration reform
plan to the floor. “Let them vote,”
was a frequent chant. But, driven by its
Radical Right/Tea Party wing, the House
majority is
resisting.
That
comprehensive reform would include a long –
some would say torturous – path to
citizenship for the 11 million undocumented
people in the U.S.
It also
would immediately bring them under U.S. labor
laws, preventing or lessening the dual
exploitation of workers by venal and vicious
employers: Hiring the undocumented and paying
them rock-bottom wages, threatening them with
deportation if they unionize – and using the
threat of hiring the undocumented to force
native-born workers to accept lower wages and
benefits and worse working
conditions.
The big march in D.C. and the prior marches on Oct. 5, including several busloads of CWA members who showed up at GOP House Speaker John Boehner’s district office in Springfield, Ohio, that day, are designed to put pressure on the Republicans to budge, CWA President Larry Cohen said.
“This is
what democracy looks like,” he said,
gesturing to the multi-racial, multi-ethnic,
multi-lingual crowd during an
interview.
The
public pressure also has indirect focus,
another union leader said: The mass movement
will grab the attention of Republican moneymen
and political operatives. They in turn will
pressure the House GOP to pass comprehensive
reform, or lose their party’s backing and
cash. “It’s a bank shot around the
Tea Party,” the unionist
said.
The political
machinations were not on the minds of the
marchers. They were there to show
enormous public backing for legalizing the
undocumented. “I’m human. I
want people to have good pay, a good job, good
health care and respect on the job,” Clyburn
said. “We’ll help people get this if
immigration reform is
passed.”
“It’s
personal for me,” said a marcher named Lauro
– he declined to give his last name – from
New York City who was carrying a large Laborers
Local 79 banner. “It’s for my family,
and it’s for my guys” in the union.
“I immigrated 16 years ago
myself.”
“How
long will we be here?” Cohen asked.
“One day longer. There’s a very
deep passion.”
- Mark
Gruenberg, PAI Staff Writer; photos by Chris
Garlock/Union City