Immigrant-Rights Marchers Head to UN id WAA27625; Sun, 12 Oct 1997 22:24:20 -0400 Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit ------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the October 16, 1997 issue of Workers World newspaper ------------------------- IMMIGRANT-RIGHTS MARCHERS HEAD TO UN By John Catalinotto New York Immigrants are on the march again. Groups concerned with the human rights of people who have come to the United States from other countries have set Oct. 12 as a day of protest demonstrations on this issue. Marches and rallies will be held in many cities around the country, including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Austin, Texas. The major action is set for New York. Coordinadora '96, the group that held a massive rally in Washington on Oct. 12 last year, has called for a protest to start here at Columbus Circle in Manhattan. It will march to the United Nations. Miguel Maldonado, a long-time organizer of undocumented workers in the New York area, is a key organizer for the Oct. 12 march on the UN. He told Workers World this year's protest will focus on demanding human rights for immigrants. Maldonado called attention to a recent report that "1,200 people crossing or attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border had been killed in the past three years." The latest killing that received nationwide publicity was of a teenaged Mexican shepherd shot to death on his family's land on the U.S. side of the border by a U.S. Marine. Many others, Maldonado said, are killed by right-wing groups that operate near the border with Mexico. "These squads call themselves something like Save Our States--SOS--and are organized by groups like the Ku Klux Klan," he said. Now police officials are taking charge of the repression. "They use death-squad methods" like those used in El Salvador and Guatemala, Maldonado said. "From Operation Rio Grande to the New York police brutalizing of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima," the official repression is getting worse. Maldonado said that this year Coordinadora '96 will ask for amnesty for all immigrants in the United States. He called that "the only humane solution" to the oppression of immigrants. As a stopgap measure, he said, the group is also demanding a permanent extension of Rule 245-I, which allows immigrants to remain in the United States for a payment of $1,000 while their status is decided. The immigrant-rights organizer noted the injustice of the government's asking $1,000 from people, most of whom work for minimum wages. But this would at least allow immigrant families to stay together. Sometimes, although children born in the United States are citizens and have the right to remain, their parents can be expelled if they stayed without official documents. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of immigrants, face a looming legal deadline. Many are confronting a choice of either defying the new immigration law or leaving jobs, homes and family here and returning to their country of origin to wait and hope that their applications for permanent U.S. residency are approved. Most participants in the Oct. 12 action are expected to come from New York, Long Island and other nearby areas. But Maldonado said the coalition also expects three busloads from Chicago, a bus from Florida, two to three buses from Detroit, and other participants from Toledo and Cleveland, Ohio. There are even demonstrators coming from Seattle and from Sunnyside, Wash., where there are many immigrant farm workers. Progressive and working-class organizations in the United States have expressed solidarity with Coordinadora '96 and the Oct. 12 protest demonstration. They note that big business has always had a two-faced attitude toward immigrants. On the one hand, the bosses welcome the arrival of a hard- working labor force that will take on much of the back- breaking work like farm work. On the other, the bosses are only too happy to keep these workers in an insecure legal position so that they can be threatened with deportation if they try to organize. But immigrant workers have also brought a high level of class consciousness to the struggle for equal rights and better pay. Despite the racist anti-immigrant campaigns funded by big business, the constant threats of deportation, and the frequent raids by immigration agents in cities around the country--despite the intimidation and harassment, immigrant workers are one of the main forces infusing the U.S. labor movement with a new militancy and energy. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@workers.org. 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