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With friends like this, immigration reform faces backlash
By Roger E. Hernandez
April 21, 2006

It was only a couple of weeks ago that the only serious obstacle to comprehensive immigration reform came from ultraconservatives.

About a million marchers later, the new threat comes from the hard left.

It's not that leftists oppose reform. The problem is that they favor it.

Everybody who is anybody on the loony left is helping to organize "A Day Without Immigrants" on May 1. Immigrants are supposed to stay home from work or school, not shop at all from any store, and wear white as a symbol of, I guess, solidarity.

The Web site of Act Now to Stop War and End Racism says, "A.N.S.W.E.R. volunteers and organizers have been working round the clock to help in logistics, organization, mobilization and all the other tasks involved in showing authentic solidarity with the immigrant workers movement."

Noble thoughts, stopping war and racism. But the group's steering committee includes the Pastors for Peace, whose aim is to keep Fidel Castro in power; the Korea Truth Commission, which thinks Kim Jong Il has built a workers' paradise in North Korea; and something called the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which describes itself as "a working class party of leaders and activists from many different struggles, founded to promote the movement for revolutionary change."

It gets worse, if that is possible. Another promoter of the boycott, the Action LA network, calls for a nationwide immigrant general strike and lists among its backers the Communist Party USA and "the Almighty Latin Kings & Queens Nation -- Sun Chapter."

Yes, communists, with a capital "C." And a street gang!

Hard to imagine anything more counterproductive. A number of grass-roots organizations, considering the boycott but not directly tied to the radicals and hoodlums, are undecided about May Day. On the one hand, they think, a successful national strike would show just how much this country depends on immigrants.

On the other, if groups like A.N.S.W.E.R. have too much visibility on May Day, comprehensive immigration reform could be made to seem like just one more extremist cause to the average American.

The ambivalence needs to stop because it is useless to carry on the boycott even while deploring the participation of radicals. Everybody who truly wants to see sensible immigration reform needs to not only denounce creeping leftism, but reject the proposed boycott altogether. Things have already moved so far left that the "Day Without Immigrants" cannot be rescued. It can only create a backlash.

Even the more moderate left that compares the recent immigrant demonstrations to civil-rights movement marches needs to tamp it down. What African-Americans demanded in the 1950s and '60s was constitutional rights they had been denied for two centuries. In contrast, what illegal immigrants are asking for today is not a right in the same sense. After all, international law recognizes that every sovereign nation can regulate the entry of foreigners and take punitive action against foreigners who violate that law.

Yet even if amnesty — or whatever one wishes to call it — is not really a civil right, enacting legislation that creates a path illegal immigrants can take to eventual citizenship is the right thing to do. Deporting 12 million people would bring the United States to the brink of bankruptcy — financially and spiritually.

Such arguments need to be made with moderation to win the sympathy of average Americans. Earned legalization is the only viable option, and it must be rescued from the left. If local pro-immigrant grass-roots groups won't do it, it is time for national organizations such as the National Council of La Raza and the National Immigration Forum to take it back.

— Roger Hernandez is a syndicated columnist and writer-in-residence at New Jersey Institute of Technology.