The organizers of the event called on the government to legalize the status of immigrant workers, guarantee equal legal protection on the job to all workers regardless of immigration status, and shorten the long wait for relatives of U.S. residents who have applied for residency.

Many of the demonstrators brought their own hand-made signs with a multitude of slogans including “Amnesty now,” “Stop the deportations,” “No human being is illegal, ” and “Legalize yes, criminalize no.”

Thousands of marchers, most of whom were from New York City and the Northeast region, came with union contingents, wearing colorful T-shirts with their union logos. Among the most sizable were delegations of health-care workers organized by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1199; garment workers from Local 23-25 of UNITE, the Laborers International Union (LIUNA) Local 79, and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE). Workers organized by Local 1445 of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) from Boston came in three buses sponsored by the union.

Many of the participants were Spanish-speaking workers, but there were also significant numbers of immigrants from Haiti, the English-speaking Caribbean, South Asia, Korea, and China. Feeder marches were organized by community organizations, local mosques, and churches in Queens and Brooklyn. Many came holding flags of their native countries with signs in different languages. Smaller groups of students came from Brown and Columbia universities, as well as Sarah Lawrence College, Wesleyan, Yale, and other campuses.

Two days earlier the caravan had converged in Washington, D.C., for a rally and a day of lobbying for immigration legislation. On the way to New York they stopped in Jersey City, New Jersey, for a rally of 1,000 at Liberty State Park.

The initiative for the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride was launched two years ago by HERE, a union with a large immigrant membership. HERE helped spearhead an effort that led the AFL-CIO executive board to reverse its position in 2000 and declare its support for amnesty for undocumented workers already living in this country. The labor federation’s previous long-standing position advocated the deportation of undocumented workers and gave support to other anti-immigrant policies of the U.S. government.  
 
Pro-Democrat ‘defeat Bush’ theme
The rally’s sponsors put forward a broad demand that the U.S. government establish “a road to citizenship” but did not advocate any concrete legislation or other measures. At the rally in Washington, speakers expressed support for a bill that would grant legal status to some 500,000 farm workers and to undocumented workers who have lived in this country for five years and have graduated from a U.S. high school.

At the New York rally, AFL-CIO president John Sweeny praised the “hard working, law-abiding immigrants who built this country.” He stated that the fight for immigrant rights is a struggle for the entire labor movement.

Linda Chavez-Thompson, AFL-CIO executive vice president, John Wilhelm, president of HERE, and other top union officials who spoke at the rally gave remarks along similar lines.

A number of Democratic Party elected officials also spoke, including Congresspeople John Lewis of Georgia, Nydia Velásquez and Charles Rangel of New York, and members of the New York City Council. New York archbishop Edward Egan, representatives of several immigrant rights organizations, and a few of the bus riders addressed the rally as well.

A dominant theme of the speakers’ remarks was to urge the defeat of George Bush in the 2004 presidential elections and to vote in a Democrat. Many blamed the Bush administration for the attacks on the rights and standard of living of working people. A similar theme had been present from the launching of the Freedom Ride. At the sendoff rally in San Francisco, for example, Democratic governor Gray Davis was a featured speaker and union officials used the platform to call for a “no” vote in the California recall election threatening Davis’s administration.

“We will put in government politicians that respond to our demands, and will put out the ones that don’t,” said María Elena Durazo, president of HERE Local 11 and national coordinator of the Freedom Ride.

One common argument was that since Sept. 11, 2001, many “law-abiding immigrants” have faced harassment and detentions. A few of the demonstrators in the crowd had signs denouncing the sweeping anti-immigrant legislation enacted by the Clinton administration in 1996—which has been used by the Bush administration—but that point was noticeably absent in the remarks from the speakers platform.

At the same time, many of the marchers expressed some of the ongoing working-class struggles and the mood of resistance among layers of working people today. “This is an opportunity to use the space we have to fight for our rights in this country,” said Elías Cáceres, an unemployed meat packer from Boston who traveled here on a bus organized by UFCW Local 1445. Cáceres came with three other packinghouse workers who have been involved in an ongoing fight to organize a union at Kayem Foods, a large meat processing plant in the Boston area with a majority immigrant work force.

At the rally were workers from the Sterling industrial laundry in Washington, DC, who recently went on strike for union recognition. Workers explained that the bosses there have tried to intimidate union supporters with the threat of revoking their “sponsorship” of a number of employees who are applying for residency.

“We are here so that immigrants can have equal rights and get rid of the fear” promoted by the immigration cops’ arrests and deportations, said Sara Martínez of Local 9221-1 of UNITE. Martínez said her union local together with UNITE Joint Board Local 10 brought 2,300 members to the rally. She said she knew about the union recognition fight by garment workers at Point Blank Body Armor in southern Florida, and added that in the 1990s, Point Blank had moved from the New York area to Florida to get rid of the union.

“Tell them to keep up the fight, and don’t let them get away with it,” she said.  
 
 
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