2010 Immigration Marches Begin!

The 2010 Immigration Marches have begun. The first group beginning their march are supporters from Miami, Florida. They began their March on Friday, Jan. 1, 2010. Their plan is to trek the fifteen hundred miles to Washington D.C., picking up advocates and supporters along the way and arriving in D.C. on May 1, 2010.
NY Times reports:
Lacing up new pairs of walking shoes with a flourish, four immigrant students set out on foot from downtown Miami on Friday, starting a four-month walk to Washington to protest what they called the Obama administration’s lack of action on legislation granting legal status to illegal immigrants. Three of the four protesters, who are current or former students at Miami Dade College, do not have legal-resident status and risk detention by immigration authorities during the 1,500-mile walk. The students’ trek shows the resolve and also some limitations of groups supporting an immigration overhaul that would include measures to legalize illegal immigrants. These groups said this week they are starting a national campaign in January to pressure President Obama to push for the overhaul before midterm elections in November. The students in Miami said in a statement that they decided to begin their walk because they had a “deep desire and need for complete citizenship” after they reached dead-ends in school or work because of their lack of legal immigration status.

Starting with a small but noisy send-off at noon by about 100 people on the steps of a landmark building in Miami known as the Freedom Tower, the students said they would walk about 16 miles a day, stopping to sleep at churches and immigration centers. They hope to reach Washington in May. They said they had concluded that the exposure to immigration agents on the walk was not much greater than what they faced in their daily lives. “We are aware of the risk,” Mr. Matos said by telephone. “We are risking our future because our present is unbearable.”

Elsewhere, immigrant groups have been trying other tactics to push for reform, after an overhaul bill they supported was defeated in the Senate in 2007 by a huge surge of voter opposition. In November the groups organized a mass conference call on which, they said, more than 60,000 participants on mobile phones spoke with Representative Luis V. Gutierrez, Democrat of Illinois, to discuss an overhaul proposal. Mr. Gutierrez introduced the bill in the House last month. In California, where hundreds of thousands of immigrants joined demonstrations in 2006, advocacy groups have shifted their focus, said Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. Now the groups are working to send immigrants who are voters to pay frequent visits to federal lawmakers who have not supported an overhaul. The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, a group in Chicago, is preparing rallies for mid-January with labor unions and African-American churches, hoping to persuade American workers that immigrants would be less likely to undercut wages if they had legal status and could participate openly in unions.

Republican lawmakers said they remained confident that they could defeat any overhaul proposal. They said it would be political folly for the Obama administration to propose a huge legalization program for illegal immigrants when so many Americans are out of work. “Allowing millions of illegal immigrants to stay and take jobs away from citizens and legal immigrants is like giving a burglar a key to the house,” said Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, the senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee.

May 1: Peaceful Marchers Support CIR vs ANTI Attack Strategy and ANTI´s Manipulation of phone, email and faxes to Congress!

May 1, 2008 marks the third anniversary of Immigration Day in the United States. Pro-immigrant groups across the country are conducting peaceful demonstrations to voice their support for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) and to voice their opposition to Family Detention Centers and Racial Profiling. The media and the marchers themselves are busy videoing these peaceful, momentous events. CNN has special iReport coverage as well as live streaming video.

While it is well recognized the vast majority of marchers are legal US Citizens marching in support of passage of CIR, ANTI groups have initiated a hate campaign to stir up problems. Alipac.us has posted a number of pages asking their members to "brace themselves.. for unrest". They are encouraging their members to: 1. deluge Congress with phone calls, emails and faxes (started 4-30, continues through 5-2), 2. face off with the marchers, submit their videos, 3. monitor police band radios and contact their local police departments. In other words, they are to do all they can to agitate and confront the marchers and send any "caught on video" displays of anger to their leaders.

NumbersUSA has also initiated a strategy and asking all members to deluge Congress:

DEAR FRIENDS, Today, we need to concentrate all of our energies into a 30-second phone message to our Members of Congress. We need a massive outpouring of tens of thousands of these little messages to counteract the pro-amnesty May Day marches that are scheduled all across our nation today. By the time Members of Congress see the marches on TV news this evening, they will know from your phone calls that most voters not only oppose an amnesty but want to start driving the 12 million illegal aliens home by passing the SAVE Act (H.R. 4088). Most of Congress still would prefer to just sidestep the illegal immigration issue this year. Your phone calls will remind them that the voters expect them to act. (they have even provided their members a script of what to say).

The members of Congress should know and understand these are small groups of people attempting to manipulate the telephone-email-fax systems to make it seem as if there are huge numbers of people involved. Instead, it is a few people manipulating the system to gain support for their ANTI agenda!