Thousands rally for immigration reform

Yawu Miller

Sam Pierre read about the immigration reform rally in the newspaper Monday morning and decided then and there he had to go.

Shortly before 5 p.m., he left his job as a billing coordinator, boarded a Green Line trolley for Park Street Station, then joined the thousands of protesters who gathered at the bandstand in the center of the Boston Common.

“I made it a point to be here,” he said, as he headed up Tremont Street in the thick of the march. “I feel obligated to be here.”

While Pierre was born in the United States, his parents came here from Haiti as did many of his friends. The rally, one of many held in major U.S. cities as the Senate debates immigration reform, was sponsored by the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition.

The Sensenbrenner-King Bill, which passed a House vote in December, would have made it a felony to provide any form of assistance to an undocumented immigrant. A Senate Judiciary Committee vote Monday removed the more punitive sections of the bill and added provisions allowing undocumented immigrants the right to apply for legal status and creating a temporary worker program that would give foreign workers six-year visas.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has indicated that he may advance his own bill, however, without the provisions voted on by the Judiciary Committee.

The debate over immigration law comes after a series of crackdowns on undocumented workers in the U.S. In the Greater Boston area in recent weeks, more than 60 undocumented workers have been arrested in sweeps, advocates say.

“If we had just immigration laws we would not be in a position of using taxpayer money to detain and deport hard-working human beings,” said Maria Elena Letona, executive director of Centro Presente, a Cambridge-based immigrant rights organization.

The size of the crowd at Monday’s rally — estimated by organizers to be more than 5,000 people — mirrored the large turnouts in rallies held across the country. In Los Angeles, more than 500,000 people rallied for the rights of immigrants.

The Boston rally was attended largely by Central and South Americans, but also by Haitians, Dominicans, whites, blacks and Asians. The Rev. Cheng Imn Tan, director of the city’s Office of New Bostonians, read a statement of support from Mayor Thomas Menino before the march began.

Chanting “si, se puede” (yes, we can) and “el pueblo unido jamas sera vencido (the people, united, will never be defeated), the crowd marched up Tremont Street to the Tremont Temple. Police closed Tremont Street and other adjacent streets for more than an hour as the marchers milled in the area.

The large turnout was not a surprise to the rally’s organizers. As Pierre pointed out, more than a quarter of Boston’s residents were born outside of the United States. Immigrant workers fill many of the lowest-paying jobs in the city, working as janitors, security guards, floor sanders and painters.

“These are the workers of Boston,” said City Life/Vida Urbana organizer Cheryl Lawrence, pointing to the crowd on Tremont Street. “To say they can’t have the same rights as everyone else is ridiculous. These people are the backbone of the city. These are the people who are going to work at 4 or 5 in the morning when everyone else is asleep.”

Those immigrants appeared to make up the bulk of the demonstration, according to MIRA Coalition Executive Director Ali Noorani.

“This is real people taking to the streets for the country they believe in, to change the laws,” he commented.

While more than a thousand demonstrators packed the Tremont Temple for an interfaith prayer service, thousands of others continued the march to Government Center, stopping in front of City Hall Plaza for an impromptu rally.

More than any other immigration demonstration in recent history, Monday’s march showed the vitality of the city’s immigrant communities, according to Letona.

“It’s very inspiring to see the immigrant community take to the streets and say ‘enough is enough,’” she said. “We are sick of being vilified and we are sick of being denigrated when we are here to help build this country.”