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 Addressing a meeting of members from over
20 student groups, leaders of Harvard’s Fuerza Latina and Student Labor
Action Movement (SLAM) called for a campus-wide walkout on May 1 to protest
federal legislation they say is anti-immigration.
After receiving a smaller-than-expected
student turnout for a national April 10 rally against the legislation,
Cristina A. Herndon
’06, former vice president of Fuerza Latina, and SLAM leader Michael
A. Gould-Wartofsky ’07 turned to intergroup collaboration in order
to most efficiently galvanize support.
The groups’ plan calls for protestors to walk out at 1 p.m. on May Day,
May 1, and stage a protest in Harvard Square before moving to a city-wide
protest being held in downtown Boston.
from the Harvard Crimson
We were also disappointed at the April
10 turnout in Boston, compared to marches in other cities, but we’re
ready to give
these guys another chance. We believe in an innate right to immigrate
– and to emigrate. God gave us free will, but men give us governments,
and often they are weak and venal men who try to appear strong and nobel, and their governments suck accordingly, and constitute a danger to the life and liberty of the people who happened to be born therein.
One of the most endearing and entertaining tenets of
Democracy is that if you disagree with the government, you can try to
change it. However, some people are not into or cut out for regime change,
and a corollary right in any free society is the freedom to leave, and
for others to come.
Empires since at least the Romans have
discovered that only through a constant infusion of new blood, ambitious
immigrant blood,
can an empire maintain its vigor and avoid complacency, sloth and endemic
cynical corruption. Quite frankly, the United States can ill afford
to cut off the inflow of imagination, daring and determination that
only someone who risks everything for a better life can contribute
to the society that provides it.
At the same time, we are not all that
sold on this May Day without Immigrants. The potential downside seems
much steeper than any possible benefit. What, after all, is the objective?
If it is to demonstrate how dependent we
are on
immigrant
labor, they
are bound to be sorely disappointed. Even if they were able to
generate a high participation rate (extremely doubtful due to the highly
publicized immigrant worker roundups around the country these past
few weeks), it would be sending the wrong message to the wrong people.
If anyplace gets paralyzed or even inconvenienced. it will be the reclaimed
Spanish Empire areas in Texas, New Mexico and Southern California,
where the
immigrants
themselves are in the majority. In the other 95% of the country it
will be a small peaceful demonstration and 2 minutes on the evening news.
If anything, the immigrants will be seen as unruly foreign fifth columnists,
destabilizing and endangering, rather than engendering, the American
Dream.
We do like the whole wear white thing,
though. A political fashion statement which will mean two very different
things to the Latinos, for whom white represents purity and perfection,
and to the Asian immigrants, to whom white usually represents death
and mourning. And the inevitable Anarchist lunatic fringe will definitely
stand out, like ebony apostrophes peppered into linguistic alfredo.
Watch this space for a report on tomorrows
events.
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