Today, May Day, 2006, millions of immigrant workers and their allies - friends, family members, neighbors, co-workers and others - will demonstrate for immigrant civil rights across the United States. Held on International Workers Day - a holiday which originated in the United States in 1886 and commemorates the heroic struggle of hundreds of thousands of mostly foreign-born American workers who struck for and won the eight-hour work-day - this historic outpouring has been billed as El Gran Paro Americano (the Great American Strike 2006) as well as Un Dia Sin Inmigrantes (Day Without Immigrants).
All over the country today, thousands upon thousands of people will be taking the day off from work, from school and from shopping, dramatizing by collective and coordinated absence the incredible importance of immigrant workers and consumers to American society. Gathering in vigils, demonstrations and mass marches, immigrant workers and their allies will demonstrate the political power of this 21st-century Civil Rights Movement.
On the Boston Common at 4 p.m., hundreds to thousands of immigrant workers, allies and student activists will be gathering in solidarity with those striking for justice across the country, calling for "Amnestia para todos!" ("Amnesty for all U.S. immigrant workers!") A Boston-wide student rally at Harvard Yard will commence at 1 p.m. and will culminate in a march to join the rally on the Common.
Here at Tufts, members of the Tufts May Day/STAIR (Students at Tufts Acting for Immigrant Rights) Coalition, a newly formed group, will gather on the campus center patio at 3 p.m. to speak out in solidarity with immigrant workers in their ongoing struggle for political and social equality, even right in Tufts' backyard. This 'backyard' includes, not only the Medford-Somerville campus, where immigrant workers help to make our campus run, but also Chinatown, where Asian immigrants' struggle against gentrification has been exacerbated by the expansion of the Tufts Medical School.
After the rally, members of the May Day Coalition will lead a march from Tufts off-campus into Somerville down Broadway to Foss Park (near the Dunkin' Donuts), to join a 4 p.m. community rally for immigrant rights. Shamefully, Foss Park in recent days has been the site of U.S. Homeland Security Department raids on undocumented workers; it is a local, and symbolic, site for immigrant rights activists.
The May Day/STAIR Coalition is rallying and marching today both to support particular immigrant civil rights struggles and to publicly oppose the repression, harassment and criminalization that immigrant workers face across the United States today.
Politicians and media pundits representing the interests of big business and right-wing nationalism seek to divert attention from a disastrous and unpopular war and a U.S. economy that is increasingly failing to produce secure, quality jobs for the most Americans by scapegoating, dividing "real Americans" off from non-citizen "foreigners" and "illegals." They seek to build walls between us, literally and figuratively. Under HR4437, the Sessenbrenner Bill - already passed by the House - lawmakers would erect a 600 mile wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, and would criminalize the 11 million undocumented workers in the United States, as well as those who assist these workers in any way-doctors, nurses, social workers, teachers, priests, you name it. The law's draconian nature has prompted immigrant activists to call it rightfully the modern equivalent of Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
We in Tufts' May Day/STAIR Coalition declare our opposition to the harassment, criminalization, exploitation and repression of our immigrant brothers and sisters. We stand in support of and in solidarity with their struggle for labor and civil rights, including the right to work and to form and become active in trade unions, the right to peacefully assemble free from police intimidation, the right to speak out against injustice and to petition employers and the government with their demands, without fear of reprisals and repression. (This means you, OneSource!)
Such democratic and civil rights are not the property strictly of U.S. citizens, but of all human beings. We, furthermore, refuse to respect policies or laws that would codify and expand the de facto caste system of racial apartheid in which millions of hard-working human beings are denied basic rights while helping to build and maintain this, richest of all nations.
We thus reject calls for exploitative "guest worker programs" and call instead for amnesty for all immigrant workers who now reside in the United States.
Far from being a "drain" on society, immigrant workers are the ones being drained today, by U.S. corporations that exploit their cheap labor, and by a government that taxes their wages but then refuses them basic human services due to their "illegal" status.
That millions of displaced and expropriated people desperately seek a better life in the United States thousands of miles from their homes and their loved ones is not to be held against these people - quite to the contrary, immigrants' spirit, hard work, courage and diverse cultural contributions to American life are to be valued and celebrated - but rather laid at the foot of an inhuman economic system which not only creates massive waves of humanity with nothing to sell but their labor-power, but exploits that labor for super-profits, even while deeming it "illegal" - always a convenient label to intimidate those workers who seek to fight back.
Join us to celebrate May Day 2006!
Joseph G. Ramsey is a graduate student at Tufts and a member of Tufts Coalition Opposed to the War in Iraq. Dan DiMaggio is a junior and the president of the Tufts Socialist Club. Daniel Brasil Becker is a sophomore.
