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September 05, 2006, 0:17 a.m.

The Not-So-”Great Labor March”
Where did all the illegal immigrants go?

By Bridget Johnson


Los Angeles, Calif. — If it weren’t for the far-left politics and the whining, this weekend’s immigration protests would have been worth it just for the food.

And the crowds weren’t so bad, either. Saturday’s “Great Labor March” in downtown Los Angeles drew about 499,000 fewer protesters than the March 25 rallies, when immigrant leaders successfully frightened their communities into believing that boogeyman James Sensenbrenner was going to snatch them from their beds in the middle of the night. The March 25 Coalition was convinced they could ride that momentum to even bigger protests. So much for that.

The official police estimate of just over 1,000 in the crowd Saturday would be diminished if it excluded the mass of food sellers that descended on the final rally site, hawking water and sodas, fruit and pork rinds. Ice-cream vendors dinging little bells on their handcarts would often walk right in front of marchers who were busy spouting something nasty about Arnold Schwarzenegger. Nearly every ten feet was an amateur chef frying a platter of peppers, onions, and giant bacon-wrapped hot dogs — surely offending the delicate sensibilities of the leftist vegan population in attendance and making it the best-smelling protest I’ve crashed in a long time.

The truly amusing thing about this cavalcade of capitalism — including vendors of flags (Mexico, United States, El Salvador, you name it) and other trinkets — descending upon this particular march is the increasingly heavy presence of socialist and Communist groups at such events, trying to suck up new members from an immigrant population that cares more about their green cards than far-flung leftist conspiracy theories about the Middle East.

Many of the protesters on Saturday — largely lower class, and probably mostly from the downtown area, judging by the vast amount of parking available — were waving American flags and listening to rally leaders advocating full legalization, panning deportation, and dissing guest-worker programs. At the same time, they were being heavily courted by wannabe revolutionaries who would rather spit on an American flag than wave one, and who are fervently trying to stoke class warfare.

Sandwiched between those grilling stations were the revolutionaries’ card tables, laden with books, newspapers, and fliers, meant to lure these single-issue political activists to their myriad paranoid causes. As I snapped a photo of one of the booths, fronted with a Spanish-language sign advocating unconditional military defense of China, Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea, a white guy in a wide straw hat ran up to me, wielding the Workers Vanguard newspaper — published by the International Communist League — and trying to sell a subscription.

It’s unclear how much the marchers cared about freeing Mumia Abu-Jamal (and they’re making “progress,” claimed the newspaper hawker) or panning U.N. intervention in Lebanon; tucked inside the newspaper, though, was a flier advocating a fight for immigrants’ rights — as well as breaking with the Democratic party to build a revolutionary workers’ party and unite in class struggle against the capitalist rulers. “Our aim is the achievement of new October Revolutions — nothing else, nothing other, nothing less,” reads the ICL’s website.

The ANSWER coalition — renowned for shoving itself into any event that remotely criticizes the Bush administration — provided slick signs and set up shop in front of a banner reading “No borders in the workers’ struggle” in Spanish and English. One white woman near the booth wore a kaffiyeh.

Many of the protesters just want to stay in America — nothing more — but some actually do have far-left positions, as evidenced by the marchers who wore PRD (Mexico’s leftist Democratic Revolution party) shirts and hoisted Spanish-language signs championing Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the perpetual presidential candidate whose wailing insistence that he’s the real winner over Felipe Calderon is starting to make Al Gore look gracious.

And some of the Hispanic groups that are taking these protests on a radical bent already prosper on a network of socialist beliefs, including the Mexica Movement, which faithfully shows up to these things with a barrage of slick signs declaring that this is their continent and whites should go back to Europe (this is a group that declares on its website that “individualism is treason”), At Saturday’s rally, they lined up their signs (including “White racists go back to Europe”) and set up a big table with t-shirts — the gist of which was that they’re not Hispanic (too European) or Latino (too Roman) but Mexican — and “educational” materials on the sidewalk directly in front of the L.A. Times building. The Mexica Movement wasn’t one of the groups pitching Che signs in the air at the rally — as their website proclaims, he’s too white for them.

This presence created a bit of a hostile environment for the pro-assimilation folks. As a speaker told the crowd that it was important to speak in English so people would understand how much they love the U.S.A., a young Hispanic man in the middle of the crowd taunted him through a bullhorn, asking if he wanted to talk to “real Mexicans.” Several feet away, a solitary Hispanic woman tried starting a “U.S.A.!” chant, to no avail.

A smattering of Brown Berets showed up, as did a flock of folklorico dancers masked like Zapatista rebels. “Brown Raza” read one t-shirt; “The Revolution/The Solution” read one sign. A focus of Saturday’s march was supposed to be to rally support for Elvira Arellano, the woman taking refuge in a Chicago church to hide from a deportation order, but I didn’t see any signs mentioning her. (Nor did I see any recognition of the gravity of the fact that she was working at O’Hare airport with a false Social Security number, but I digress.)

What I’d love to see at an upcoming immigration rally is a booth set up by Cuban immigrants, offering educational materials on how these far-left systems wreck lives and dreams. After all, it’s the American Dream that brings so many from south of the border north, not the opportunity to lose their individuality and become a faceless slave to a far-left agenda.

That chasm between the patriots and revolutionaries could really be contributing to the 499,000-participant drop from the famed spring protest to the March 25 Coalition’s aim at a Labor Day weekend repeat. Regardless, I’m sure the capitalist food vendors were disappointed.

— Bridget Johnson is a columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News. She blogs at GOP Vixen.