Immigration Rally In Los Angeles of Hispanic Leaders is Dismal Failure
Local bands played rock music, vendors offered chicken tacos, and dozens of activists set up information booths in a downtown field. But more than an hour after the rally started, most of those in the paltry crowd were organizers and journalists.
Organizers, who had expected about 5,000 participants, played down the low turnout.
"This community has shown it wants a solution, so we shouldn't have to show it with half a million people each time we do it," said Maria Elena Durazo, secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO.
This was the finale of a week full of immigration reform rallies. Advocates hope to pressure Congress to take up the issue when it returns to work on Tuesday, much as huge protests had spurred action from lawmakers in March.
But in city after city, the turnout was well below what organizers had hoped. Rallies in Batavia, Ill., San Francisco and Phoenix drew about 2,000 people each; hundreds marched in Dallas and Portland, Ore.; and in Washington, where organizers said they expected to draw a million protesters to the Mall on Thursday, fewer than 5,000 came.
In Los Angeles, where 400 people had turned out on Monday for a labor solidarity march, the Saturday rally was to have been the culmination of this week's National Latino Congreso, billed as one of the largest gatherings of Hispanic leaders in decades.
Sessions included speeches and workshops on registering Hispanic voters, running for office, the wage gaps between Hispanics and whites, environmental issues and a lack of access to health care in immigrant communities.
But the week's central issue was the creation of new strategies to urge lawmakers to offer illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.
"We need to frame this as a national security issue," said Peter Schey, president of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law in Los Angeles. "It's ridiculous to have immigrants at airports giving their fingerprints when there are 12 million people in the country illegally."
The House passed legislation in December that would add hundreds of miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border and criminalize any assistance given to illegal immigrants.
That bill created a groundswell of anger in immigrant communities, leading to a 500,000-strong rally in Los Angeles in March that was followed by hundreds of other demonstrations across the country.
The Senate rejected the House bill when it took up immigration reform in April, instead passing a measure that would strengthen border security and create a limited legalization program. Since then, however, Congress has all but shelved immigration legislation. And efforts by pro-immigrant coalitions to register thousands of new voters have yet to take shape.
