Nationwide rallies mark "a day without immigrants" in U.S.

Hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants and their supporters staged rallies, marches and boycotts across the United States Monday, in a renewed effort to claim their rights to stay in the country.

"We are also Americans. We work here and contribute to the economy. We are here to ask for our due rights," a young female demonstrator giving only the first name Mary from El Salvador, told Xinhua at an emotional rally in the Meridian Hill Park in northern Washington DC.

An approximately 1,000 people attended the rally, holding placards that read "full rights for all immigrants," waving flags both of the U.S. and their native countries and wearing T-shirts with the slogan "legalization, justice and dignity."

Many of them left their workplaces to take part in the nationwide Latino boycott called "a day without immigrants," which also staged acts like closing down shops, rejecting buying commodities and skipping school classes.

Dante Strobino, a workers' rights activist from the nearby North Carolina, said he and other organizers brought some 300 immigrant workers here for the event.

He said the immigrant workers should be treated equally with any other workers and called Monday's rallies "part of the U.S. civil rights movement."

Some U.S. citizens, like Julia Finkelstein from the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in North Carolina, said the illegal immigrants are doing the right thing by asking for the legalization of their status.

"They are taking the jobs that most Americans wouldn't do and there is no law to protect them. Things ought to change," she said.

U.S. media reported rallies of different scales were being held in some 60 cities throughout the day.

In Chicago, Illinois, about 300,000 demonstrators showed up in one of the biggest rallies around the country while in Los Angeles, California, up to 1 million people participated in two separate marches.

In New York, thousands of workers took work breaks for about 20 minutes to form "human chains" throughout the city's five boroughs, linking arms with shoppers, restaurant-goers and other supporters.

In New Orleans, Louisiana, several thousand demonstrators attended a rally, carrying signs that read "Proud to rebuild" and "We come to work."

In southern Florida, thousands of protesters gathered in a vacant lot in Homestead, a community with a large Mexican population.

Many farm workers stayed home, handicapping one of the biggest industries in Salinas, California, a largely Latino city.

Although the impact of the boycott is too early to be assessed, some big businesses are already shutting down operations as workers leave their posts. Six of 14 Perdue Farms plants are forced to close while Tyson Foods Inc., the world's largest meat producer, shut five of its nine beef plants and four of its six pork plants.

An estimated 7.2 million illegal immigrants are now working in the United States, making up 4.9 percent of the overall labor force, according to a recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center. Other estimates put the number at more than 11 million.

The protests began in March, stirred by a congressional bill that would make employing illegal immigrants a felon and wall up over a third of the U.S.-Mexican border to prevent illegal border-crossing.

The bill was passed by the House of Representatives in December 2005 but has got stuck at the Senate.

In April, Senate passed a compromise bill aiming to toughen the legalization process for illegal immigrants who have been in the country less than five years.

But the bill was stalled when Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid objected to Majority Leader Bill Frist's decision to let Republican senators offer amendments to the measure.

Meanwhile, the immigration debate has split Republicans as midterm elections approach.

U.S. President George W. Bush, in order to woo Latino voters to his party, has called for a guest-worker program that offers legal status for illegal workers in the United States for over one year.

He said days earlier that he opposed the boycott but insisted that the immigration reform must move forward.

Source: Xinhua