http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/miami/18107.html

Migrants´ rights crusade now a mass movement
BY DAN LUND
El Universal
Viernes 05 de mayo de 2006
Miami Herald, página 1


Viewed from Mexico, the demonstrations of March 25, April 10 and May 1 in the United States were stunning images of masses of immigrants and their supporters. In their hundreds and thousands, and all together in their millions, among those who turned out were Dominicanos, Haitianos, Salvadoreños, Hondureños, Nicaraguenses, Guatemaltecos - and above all Mexicanos.

The new immigrant movement we are seeing appears very much a media thing. It is being stimulated by the media, particularly Latino radio in the urban market centers, and sustained by more personal media forms like internet and instant messaging. It is being observed and validated in real time by the electronic media. And, it is being instantly judged and evaluated by the whole ensemble of media, particularly print.

If the immigrant protest existed only through these stimulations, validations and analyses it would be a media phenomenon, and not really a movement.

However, the immigrant rights movement, now centered in the Latino communities, has deep roots and a long history in the United States.

What is new is that it is now a mass movement.

Intensified emigration from Mexico and other countries in the past several decades and the diaspora of the immigrants throughout the country has provided the basis for a broad national presence in scores of cities, at the same time maintaining its historic centers of concentration.

Like the civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s, the immigrant rights mobilizations constitute a mass movement by being cross-generational. We are seeing striking images of young people who are U.S. citizens marching for their illegal parents and extended families.

We listen to parents who have pulled their children out of school to march because they want them to understand what their family is all about.

This mass movement seems to be directly related to the discussions of migration reform in the U.S. Congress, but it is likely to go far beyond this congressional term or the next, and whatever "reforms" are proposed in this immediate period.

While it is difficult to anticipate the shape and texture of the movement to come, it is possible to look back at some of its roots and historical dynamics, particularly with regard to the core group, the Mexican immigrants.

THE HISTORICAL ROOTS

The roots of immigrant rights struggles go back to the time when the Mexican residents of the U.S. Southwest became instant immigrants in their own land, after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the War of 1847 between Mexico and the United States. This period corresponds with the height of anti-slavery agitation in the United States, followed by the Civil War, the ending of slavery and the granting of civil rights to the freed slaves. It also corresponds in time to the height of the first great wave of European emigration to the United States, and the growth of Nativist anti-immigrant groups.

At many points of the past century and a half, the Mexicans-now-Americans, the European immigrants and the freed slaves were fighting in parallel fashion for basic rights, though not often in common cause.

These fights continued through the 19th century and reached a crescendo in the period just after the World War I. European immigration was curtailed in the early 1920s and the immigrants were integrated culturally through the dramatic expansion of adult public education. The integrated European immigrants were drawn into the industrial labor movement, where many of their struggles were defined.

SENIORITY CLAIM

African Americans out of the South encountered both new possibilities and new forms of discrimination in the urban United States. On the fringes of the labor movement, they began to articulate the issues and forms of a modern civil rights movement. Having been in the United States since 1619, African Americans had as much seniority as any immigrant group and they also inevitably felt some distance from the later immigrants since they had been integrated into U.S. language and culture as long as any immigrant group of the colonial period.

With the effective end of European immigration, Mexican border crossers became the centerpiece for the massive immigration cycles of the 1920s to the present. Sometimes they were legal as in the Bracero Programs of 1942 through 1964, but they were mostly illegal. Waves of Mexicans crossed and returned in time, or were returned forcibly, and then crossed again. The dynamic has never stopped, nor has it been rationalized.

BLENDING ELEMENTS

While many Mexicans in the United States played important roles in the labor movement and were drawn into the developing civil rights movement, the quintessential form for immigrant rights seems to be a combination of labor rights, civil rights and immigration reform itself. The current immigration rights movement is a still awkward integration of aspirations, styles and organizations. What it will be in the future is something we should stand on tiptoes to watch. As in all movements, it is likely to confront new moments of confusion, mistakes and division; support from other sectors and sympathy from the media will wax and wane. There will be martyrs and newly heroic leaders, long struggles to change public opinion and movement lawyers crafting immigration reform proposals that will put the current efforts to shame. Most of all there are likely to be new organizational forms that we can only guess at.

The process of forging a coherent immigration policy for this century is destined to be a long one - full of all the setbacks the labor movement still suffers and all the pain the civil rights movement must still endure.

But if the images we are seeing of youth, of families, of religious support, and of cultures in dynamic embrace mean anything, they mean there is a way forward.

Dan Lund is president of MUND Américas, a market and public policy research group in Mexico. dlund@mundamericas.com