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'Illegals' label denies people their dignity
By L.A. CHUNG
San Jose Mercury News
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Did you see what happened in San Jose on Monday? Or in Oakland, Santa Ana, Las Vegas, and Phoenix? In New York, and Washington, D.C.? In Bloomington, Ind.?

Twenty-five thousand people filled San Jose's City Hall plaza. Five hundred thousand in the Capitol Mall in Washington. Record numbers were seen in communities across the country.

The swelling, exuberant crowds -- and the passion -- of those who marched surprised me. It surprised organizers all over the country. But it shouldn't have.

That's what happens when you undermine people's very dignity.

When the tenor of the heated national debate is colored by words that virtually question your very right to exist -- illegals -- who wouldn't take to the streets? When lawmakers want to make people felons for coming here to work, when they try to make socializing, ministering, helping those people a criminal act, why wouldn't you go out into the streets?

Listen to me carefully here, and take note: People are not illegal. Actions may well be, but human beings are never illegal.

A dialogue-stopper

As a wordsmith it hurts my ears to hear adjectives turned into nouns. But it makes my blood boil to hear people reduced to a word that denies their existence.

Use that, and anything you say to me afterward will not be heard. You've already shown me your colors. Your sloppy thinking. Your racism.

No wonder we have difficulty having a reasoned debate about public policy. We start off offending people and then we're surprised how hard it is to make progress from there.

No wonder so many people were proudly asserting their existence -- and why so many supported them.

``It was really empowering and energizing, to be a part of something positive and proactive -- instead of reacting,'' said Anh Phan, a staff member of the Organization of Chinese Americans. She marched in Washington, where she heard people with family stories like many in her own community.

Her group believes in immigration reform, that the system has long been broken and that fair, comprehensive reform would help all of us.

Why is it that the illegal act of crossing a border to work identifies any person?

Is that act worthy of denigrating people's very existence, any more than, say, executive greed?

Keeping our humanity

If we're playing that game, let's see newscasters and politicians call Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom or Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco ``illegals'' for a change. Hey, if you're serving 25 years to life in the largest case of corporate fraud in U.S. history the way Ebbers is, wouldn't that qualify as law-breaking, big time? Or surely the excesses of looting Tyco of $150 million to pay for an $18 million Manhattan apartment or lavish birthday party in Sardinia, compounded with securities fraud and falsifying business records, could make Kozlowski an ``illegal.'' Oh, and $430 million reaped from artificially inflating stock value.

Imagine Martha Stewart, with her federal conviction as ``an illegal.'' Or the Queen of Mean? Leona Helmsley, jailed and convicted for tax evasion, could have been called the ``Imperious Illegal.''

See how ugly that sounds? And yet there are those who want to pick on people who simply want to work for a better life for their families.

``When people do that they are losing a sense of their own humanity and heart -- to view people as illegal as opposed to a human being,'' Phan said sadly.

No wonder people went out to the streets. You're talking about their mothers, their fathers, their sisters, their brothers.

They went onto the streets, taking back their dignity.


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Contact L.A. Chung at lchung@mercurynews.com or (40 920-5280.