100,000 marched in Chicago.
10,000 marched in Phoenix.
500,000 marched in Los Angeles.
It is a storm that seemed to come out of nowhere.
The House has passed and the Senate is considering legislation that would transform over 10 million people, and anybody who assists them, into felons overnight.
While some here at DKos debate how this issue will effect the electoral chances of the Dems, there is more fundamental question here, of whether we are going to be on the right side of history.
There are moments of decision when questions of political expediency must be pushed aside. This is such a moment.
The appeal of anti-immigrant hysteria can not be separated from the mass export of once well-paying manufacturing jobs overseas. Anti-immigrant legislation enables the right to posture as if they are doing something to save "American jobs." But the truth is that further criminalizing undocumented workers won't stop the flow of cheap labor across the borders. What it will do is further strip undocumented workers of their dignity and basic human rights. It will transform them from serfs to slaves.
While most white folk are barely aware of this legislation it has awakened the sleeping giant of the Latino community just as the Montgomery Bus Boycott awakened Black America to fight for civil rights.
We live in a globalized economy. Too many so called progressives look back wistfully to days that will not return and refuse to face up to the fact that the scale on which we must fight has shifted under our feet. In a world in which capital and goods flows freely across borders restrictive immigration controls must be understood for what they are: a system of global apartheid that condemns poor and dark-skinned people to crushing economic exploitation and secures the allegiances of first world workers with the fear of losing their privileged status.
We need to speak clearly about the kind of world we want to live in. Guest worker programs and other half-measures that divide workers into first and second-class categories are an affront to human dignity. We must uphold the principle of the free movement of all peoples on this planet and the right to a decent life everywhere. Our enemies are not the poor of the world but the transnational corporate plutocrats who would melt the ice caps or the skin off an Iraqi child to raise their stock prices by a penny a share.
We all need to actively support this movement and to recognize it for what it is, a portent of a better way of being human.
