Immigration march set for Thursday (Barfer)

Seattle PI ^ | April 29, 2008 | John Iwasaki

[jazusamo]

The passionate debate over immigration and workers' rights has dropped a few degrees from past years, but hundreds or thousands of demonstrators are expected to march through downtown Seattle during afternoon rush hour Thursday with a basic message:

"We are not undocumented. We are not illegal. We are workers." Or, as a bilingual flier for the event states in Spanish, "No somos ilegales. No somos indocumentados. Somos trabajadores."

Until the nation's broken immigration system is repaired -- a process that might take years -- the rights of workers must be protected, organizers said Monday in announcing the ninth annual march.

They complained that federal agencies, with the help of local governments, are stripping the rights of Latinos and practicing racial profiling, allegations that federal officials deny.

"Washington state needs the labor of the immigrant," said Jorge Quiroga, spokesman for El Comite Pro-Amnistia General y Justicia Social (The Committee for General Amnesty and Social Justice), the main organizers of the march.

While "nativists" who oppose illegal immigration want all those without documents to be deported, that is not a realistic solution, said Jeff Johnson, research director of the Washington State Labor Council. Removing the estimated 12 million undocumented individuals in the U.S. would be akin to eliminating the population of the Northwest, he said.

The nation's immigration system does not allow enough immigrants to enter the country legally and makes it difficult for those who try, said the Most Rev. Eusebio Elizondo, auxiliary bishop for the Catholic Archdiocese of Seattle.

The process is lengthy and expensive and "pushes people to go beneath the law," he said.

Those who risk their safety by crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally "do not have other ways to respond to the needs of (their) family," Quiroga said. "We should be proud of these type of people."

What should prompt concern, organizers say, is the treatment of Latinos by immigration officials and other agencies that appear racially based.

The organizers said that Latinos riding ferries between the San Juan Islands and Anacortes have been pulled aside and checked for documents based only on their skin color.

The spokesman for the U.S. Border Patrol in Blaine could not be reached for comment.

Araceli Hernandez, programs manager at CASA Latina in Seattle, said undocumented men trying to get day-labor jobs through the organization's center have been "tricked" and detained by immigration agents posing as employers.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has not gone to CASA Latina and does not find undocumented people in that random manner, said Lorie Dankers, a Seattle spokeswoman for the federal agency.

Elizondo said agents also had stopped a Latina on Terry Avenue near St. James Cathedral for no reason other than race. Dankers said the incident was "probably a rumor" and did not involve her agency.

While there is a "risk in being in the country illegally," Dankers said, "people here legally have absolutely nothing to worry about."

[jazusamo]

WA Ping!

[bill1952]

passionate debate over immigration and workers’ rights

now a bunch of criminal aliens has some logical link to “workers rights?”
How freakin Socialist. - cute.

[chris_bdba]

If you weren’t born here or are a naturalized citizen or don’t have a green card, you are an illegal immigrant. If that bothers you, go home, get in line and reenter the proper way. Ohterwise you are an illegal.

[freespirited]

"We are not undocumented. We are not illegal."

You aren't rocket scientists either.

[AngelesCrestHighway]

“No somos ilegales. No somos indocumentados. Somos trabajadores.”

Speaka the English you jackasses!

[DuncanWaring]

The nation's immigration system does not allow enough immigrants to enter the country legally and makes it difficult for those who try, said the Most Rev. Eusebio Elizondo, auxiliary bishop for the Catholic Archdiocese of Seattle. The process is lengthy and expensive and "pushes people to go beneath the law," he said.

I wonder how the Reverend Elizondo would respond to a suggestion that it's hard to follow all ten commandments, and some should be repealed in order to make it easier to get to Heaven.

[DuncanWaring]

Even La Raza doesn’t claim Seattle.

[AngelesCrestHighway]

“but hundreds or thousands of demonstrators are expected to march through downtown Seattle during afternoon rush hour Thursday with a basic message:”......

And that message is: HA! HA!...you can’t get home!

[jazusamo]

Good point, I believe the bishop would disagree. :)

[ComputerGuy]

The spokesman for the U.S. Border Patrol in Blaine could not be reached for comment.

You're going to have to yell pretty loud to get the USBP. They're hundreds of miles away by now.

[AngelesCrestHighway]

The wonderful thing about those Seattle Whacks running the city....They just love to grant protest marches at rush hour. One time they had a bunch of numbnuts stopping traffic in the middle of the 520 bridge and they wouldn’t arrest them.

[griswold3]

After all it is a communist holiday!

[jazusamo]

I guess it’s not surprising the moonbats running Seattle would give them a permit to march thru downtown at work traffic hour.

I’ve lived in WA over 10 years and haven’t been to Seattle, don’t plan on going there either.

[JoanneSD]

I have heard from a lot of politicians that the illegals were in the shadows..plus that they were here to work... they not working Thursday afternoon?

[tumblindice]

“Speaka the English you jackasses!”

A foreigner on a subway, talking to a friend:
“First, Emma come. Then I come. Then the first two asses. Then I come again. Two more asses, an’ I come again. Then two pee, an’ I come-a one last time.”

A woman waved her umbrella at him and said, “You disgusting man! In this country we don’t talk about our sex lives in public!”

And he replied, “No lady, my friend—he fresh offa the boat from Italia an’ I’m justa tryin’ to teach him to spell `Mississippi’.

[Redleg Duke]

"The spokesman for the U.S. Border Patrol in Blaine could not be reached for comment. "

Actually, ICE would be the group to be consulted. USBP handles the border (That is the boundary between the US and Mexico or the US and Canada, for all you "Principled Conservatives"!), and I would expect ICE to be working this march.

[Hoffer Rand]

Please, please, please, march! Wave flags and signs. Announce your presence to the world. Bring your little anchor babies. Shout and chant in whatever language for the media. The louder you are, the more Americans you wake up. And the more angry they become at your presence in OUR country. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll join us in standing up to our leaders in doing something about it.

[AuntB]

First a quote from Reagan.
“Our country and state have a special obligation to work toward the stabilization of our own population so as to credibly lead other parts of the world toward population stabilization.” Ronald Reagan, Governor, State of California, Hearings before Subcommittee on Census and Population, 1974.

Fred Charles Ikle a Distinguished Scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, served as under secretary of defense for policy in the Reagan administration and as director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the Ford administration.

OUR PERPETUAL GROWTH UTOPIA
[snips]

Folly likes company. The growth utopians in our midst are not only kicking conservation-minded citizens into the enemy camp, but with their advocacy of high levels of immigration, they are also alienating many traditional conservative voters. A great many Americans of conservative persuasion do not regard their country’s borders as merely an obstacle to global free trade, an obsolete “protectionist” contraption that must be done away with. They value the borders as a breakwater that will protect their—yes, their— nation’s social fabric and political culture in a stormy world.

Yet, our Jacobins insist on open borders and “free immigration”. Whoever disagrees is a “racist”’; never mind that among American blacks, whose forefathers helped build this country, many also disagree. And whoever proposes that the United States should regain control if its borders will be derided as wanting a “Berlin Wall”. (Erich Honecker must have been mighty pleased to see distinguished Americans confirm what he always asserted about his wall: that it was never meant to imprison his people, but to keep out “undocumented” Westerners.)

The extreme Left in America is delighted. Like their soul mates in Europe, they have long pined for a split among conservatives that would create a faction they could attack as “fascist”, thus forcing all other conservatives to spend their entire time proving that they, by contrast, are not fascist. This stratagem worked in France and Germany, until, the conservative parties at last began to cope with immigration, and thus sharply curtailed their loss of votes to “anti-immigration” splinter parties.

and to mitigate these bumps, people nowadays demand—unfortunately—that government interfere ever more. The more populations are culturally and linguistically divided, the more irritating the bumps will be—hence the louder the demands for government-determined outcomes. To be sure, we conservatives know that we want less government, not more. But many in our midst fail to see that an unintended consequence of all the good growth they are advocating will be more government.

http://towncriernews.blogspot.com/2008/04/bigger-isnt-always-betterwords-from.html

[RonF]

Those who risk their safety by crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally "do not have other ways to respond to the needs of (their) family,"

Sure they do. They could rise up in rebellion against the oligarchy that has stolen their country from them.