Enough said!
Posted on 09/24/2003 9:33:53 PM PDT by JustPiper
Cheering immigration-rights activists and union organizers clapped and chanted Tuesday morning as a bus bound for Washington, D.C., pulled up to St. Joseph's Catholic Church.
The sojourn is modeled after the Freedom Ride of the Civil Rights Movement, which carried students campaigning to end segregation in the South 43 years ago. The new Freedom Ride seeks justice for immigrant workers and is larger in scale, with 10 buses departing simultaneously from 10 U.S. cities.
The foreign-born riders range from professionals to low-wage workers at different stages in the immigration process — but all believe there's something inhumane and contradictory about present U.S. immigration policies. As a large part of the U.S. labor force and taxpayers, they insist they are too important to be ignored.
They hope that by sharing their stories of separation from family, work-place inequality, fruitless years trying to obtain citizenship and discrimination based on their countries of origin, they will change lawmakers' minds about immigration, worker rights and civil liberties.
"We have a saying in my country," said passenger Noor Ahmed, a Somali engineer who recently escaped deportation when the 9th Court of Appeals upheld a federal court decision barring deportation of Somalis. " 'The baby must cry so that the mother knows he's hungry.' We are like the baby: We need to let our mother the government know what is wrong in order to get what we need."
While stopped in Yakima for a brief press conference, Selah's Tomas Aganda — a Filipino businessman battling to keep his family from being deported — roused the crowd into an outpouring of pathos by simply saying, "I'm under deportation."
Hands punched in the air. State Rep. Velma Veloria of Seattle led chants of "What do we want?" "Justice." Ahmed put his arm around Aganda.
Amid tears, hugs and Mexican folk songs, three Yakima riders — Rafael Magaña, Maria Diaz and Berta Balli-Sheldrick — boarded the bus with the rest of the group.
Two of the local riders are immigrants from Mexico and represent their local unions on the trip.
GORDON KING/Yakima Herald-Republic Bus riders and other rally participants gathered in front of the bus across the street from the IBP/Tyson Foods meat processing plant in Wallula as they prepared to spread their message of immigration reform to workers leaving and entering the plant Tuesday afternoon. Magaña, 30, carried a camera and a suitcase full of union shirts, one for each day.
Like many young men from Mexico, he grew up surrounded by the fruits of other people's work in the United States, where the number of stories or bedrooms on a house measured the number of years its owner had worked in the States.
Those houses, next to older adobe structures, were a daily reminder of prosperity to the north.
Eventually, Magaña decided he, too, would cross the border. At 14, after a scary trip with a "coyote" — a hired guide who exacted stiff fees to usher immigrants across the border — he wound up in Sunnyside cutting asparagus.
Sixteen years later Magaña is legalized and is the shop steward for his union at Washington Beef, where he estimates 90 percent of the workers are immigrants.
"If you look in the fields, restaurants, hotels, construction — all the hardest jobs. They're immigrants. If all these people weren't here, this economy would fall apart," he said in Spanish.
Magaña knows only too well what it's like not to have papers, which is why he wants to make life easier for other immigrants.
When he did become a citizen by marrying a woman from the U.S., the first thing he did was get a driver's license.
"I felt free," he said.
Magaña and the riders on the other buses are scheduled to arrive Oct. 1 in Washington, D.C., where the next day they will ask Congress to make immigration a priority this session.
Deport him, Dano.
But the newspaper guardians of the revolution must be giddy with delight over this quote:
"We need to let our mother the government know what is wrong in order to get what we need."
Ah yes, Mother Government indeed. This guy really gets it, doesn't he? Gee, I wonder which way he'll vote, assuming he hasn't voted several times already.
Immigrants of the world, unite!
The Democratic Party needs your votes
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