Half a Million Marched

Los Angeles Times

When it was all over, nearly half a million people had participated in the two protests and marches for immigrants' rights in Los Angeles. Thousands more showed up in Riverside and Santa Ana. Stores, restaurants, and businesses closed for lack of employees and promised lack of customers. In Sacramento, the state legislature did not meet for regular session; instead, many Democratic state legislators joined the protests there. And that was just one state.

The local television coverage in Los Angeles, while perhaps overly dramatic, was for the most part fair, showing faces of those who were intent on reclaiming their dignity and demanding respect for the work they do. It was not just another day in paradise.

If these marchers wanted to continue to keep the issue of immigrants rights on the front page of the national consciousness, they succeeded, and did so without rioting or burning. Members of Congress have had the issue shoved before them in a way no one had counted on. Now they have to do something.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune took notice of all of yesterday's proceedings in an editorial.

...as hundreds of employers -- from corner coffee shops to food giants such as Perdue Farms -- faced the reality that they could not operate without immigrant labor, the rest of Americans faced a reckoning of their own -- that immigration is changing the nation in a way that cannot, and should not, be undone.

...Counting just the undocumented, these new Americans represent almost 1 in 20 of the nation's workers.

Most fascinating is the way the national conversation has evolved as these realities have sunk in. Immigrant communities have plunged into their own internal debates -- deciding that perhaps it is not productive to wave a Mexican flag while seeking citizenship rights or to withhold their children from school, even for a day. Conservative lawmakers who were talking about border dogs and felons just a few months ago today find themselves talking about assimilation and job skills. Social liberals are recognizing that many Americans are quite offended by deliberate lawbreaking, and that many in the middle class feel under economic threat.

The argument on the issue has been reframed in a way that should make for a more reasonable answer to the 'problems' of illegal immigration. The trick is going to be to keep the pressure on Congress for that to happen.