Photos of Chicago Immigrant Rights March - 400,000!!!
Photos and Text By Charles Shaw
From May 2, 2006

“The worm, as they say, is turning. Yesterday was the largest political demonstration in Chicago history, and the second march of 400,000 or Americans I have participated in within the last 2 years. The spirit was high, and the people were alive, an explosion of color and culture and language and rage and civic pride, all that which real democracy must be based upon.  All peoples must rise up and fight for their rights, because power concedes nothing without a demand. Our ancestors came to this country as immigrants—some of them legal, some of them not—and they stayed and the worked and the lived, they built this nation and they fought its wars: first the Germans, then the Irish, then the Italians and Poles and the Swedes and the Chinese, and then all the rest. And each in turn was despised for it by the ruling order. But they persevered and they earned their respect and moved their way up into the middle class to become part of the inextricable fabric of the nation, to become Americans.  Two generations later, to maintain economic hegemony, we opened the borders again and called for all the best talent in the world to come and be part of the American dream. They came, they helped us become the richest nation on earth, and now they want what is theirs: a chance to pursue what all previous generations got to pursue. Their time has come. We must acknowledge these Latin and Asian tigers as a part of us, the extended zoology of American society. They have proven their worth. They deserve it.

A man on the radio today decried the plan to build a wall across the Mexican border saying “all fading Empires build walls.” We must be wary of the convenient scapegoating of the immigrant as “enemy alien.”  We must not fall prey to fatuous propaganda, which says that Immigrants are crushing the nation under economic hardship, that your “tax dollars” go to support “deadbeat immigrants on welfare”  Do not be so foolishly naïve. Of every tax dollar you spend, half goes to the Pentagon, and nearly $.30 goes to pay off the national debt, money none of us borrowed but we and our children and our children's children are stuck paying for. The remaining $.20 or so of every dollar goes for all the other Federal programs put together, which is why the US needs to borrow $2billion a day to keep the government afloat. The biggest recipients of “welfare” in America are transnational corporations worth billions of dollars.

Lastly, let us remember that unless you are like my adopted sister, who is Ojibway, we are all immigrants to this land, and none of us possesses the moral high ground on this issue. To deny the immigrant is to deny yourself; to impugn the immigrant is to impugn yourself. So let their voices be heard! Let those chickens in to roost, let the great social experiment continue, let America evolve. It may be the only interesting, and in the end, redeeming, thing left about us.