La Opinion: Are Pro-Immigrant Marches Beneficial or Counterproductive? La Opinion
go to original May 4, 2013

Immigration Reform Protests Rise Up Across America (AOL)

As Congress begins to discuss immigration reform, immigrant rights groups, DREAMers and their supporters marched in many U.S. cities, begging the question: Do these marches help achieve the goal of legislation beneficial to immigrants or are they counterproductive?

It all depends on whom you ask and how you interpret history. For Professor Gonzalo Santos, a sociologist at California State Bakersfield, you just have to look at the repercussions of the May 1, 1886 workers’ strike in Chicago.

"It is ironic that we are asking this question today, May 1, which commemorates an 1886 march of the emerging labor movement in Chicago demanding an eight-hour work day. That march was attacked by police, its leaders were eventually executed, and it was quashed immediately. But even so, it was the basis for the worldwide workers’ movement for decades to come," said Santos.

The same could be said, according to Santos, of the 1994 marches against California’s Proposition 187, the national mass mobilizations of 2006, and other marches in recent years. But, he admits, these demonstrations "combined with other actions to attain the eventual social change."

Randy Jurado Ertll, director of Pasadena’s Center of Social Action, said marches can help, but it depends on how they are carried out.

Read the rest at New America Media

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