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News :: Civil & Human Rights |
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Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides Rally -- Monday At 7p.m. |
Current rating: 0 |
by Demian Kogan
Email: dakogan (nospam) uiuc.edu (unverified!)
Phone: 778-3638 |
27 Sep 2003
Modified: 28 Sep 2003 |
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RALLY for IMMIGRANT RIGHTS!
Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides Rally
Monday, September 29th 7:00p.m.
Champaign County Courthouse
101 E. Main Street, Urbana, IL 61801
******************************************** |
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RALLY for IMMIGRANT RIGHTS!
Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides Rally
Monday, September 29th 7:00p.m.
Champaign County Courthouse
101 E. Main Street, Urbana, IL 61801
*********************************************
Immigrants in our community need:
-- Driver Licenses
-- Hospital Interpreter Services
-- Access to Higher Education
-- Legalization for Immigrants
-- Workers Rights
-- An End to Special Registration Programs
Beginning on September 20th, nearly one thousand immigrant workers and their allies will board buses in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Chicago, Houston, Miami and Boston and cross the United States over the next 12 days. The new Freedom Riders will travel some 20,000 miles of U.S. highways and stop at more than 100 cities, towns and workplaces to focus public attention on the injustices of current immigration policies.
The Illinois Freedom Rides bus is coming to Champaign-Urbana to highlight the local movement for immigrant rights ! You have a tremendous opportunity to take part in history in the making by attending the Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides Rally in Urbana-Champaign! Speakers will include: Immigrant Freedom Riders, Local Immigrant Rights Speakers, and Local Politicians.
The event is inspired by the Freedom Rides of the Civil Rights Movement, and the Illinois Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride bus will travel through Northern, Central, and Southern Il, while buses leave from 9 other cities across the entire United States. The buses will then go to Washington D.C. to meet with local representatives, and then culminate in New York City to celebrate the rewriting of history. Don’t miss this opportunity to locally take part in this national campaign for immigration policy reform.
Sponsored by: Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee rights (ICIRR),
East Central Illinois Refugee and Mutual Assistance Center (ECIRMAC),
Champaign County Health Care Consumers (CCHCC), AWARE, School for Designing a Society, African Americans Studies and Research Program, Teachers for Peace and Justice, UIUCSOAW, GEO, University YMCA, El Centro Por Los Trabajadores, La Casa, Center for Democracy in a Multiracial Society, Progressive Resource/Action Cooperative, Latina/o Studies Program, Indipendent Media Center.
For more information, or to volunteer or donate, contact:
Demian Kogan: dakogan (at) uiuc.edu
Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides national website: www.iwfr.org
Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights website: www.icirr.org
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Comments
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Border Patrol Stops 'Freedom Ride' Buses |
by Chris Roberts, AP
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
27 Sep 2003
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EL PASO, Texas - Two buses carrying nearly 100 people making a "Freedom Ride" to bring attention to mistreatment of undocumented immigrants were stopped for nearly four hours Friday at a U.S. Border Patrol station.
The riders were asked to leave the buses and were questioned, said Hilda Delgado, a spokeswoman on the buses. All were later released, and the buses were back on the road to San Antonio by about noon.
Border Patrol spokesman Mario Villarreal said the stop was routine and no immigration violations were detected.
Delgado, who said she is a U.S. citizen from Los Angeles, wouldn't say whether any of the individuals on the buses were in the country illegally. She said they held up Freedom Ride cards to officials who questioned them.
The cards say that the ride is peaceful, that they exercise their right to remain silent, that they don't consent to a search and don't give up any rights. The card also has the name of a lawyer to contact.
"We have been singing solidarity songs on the bus," Delgado said. "We are trying to expose the injustice of current policies toward immigrants."
Delgado said the people on the bus represent 10 million undocumented immigrants who contribute $730 million each year to the U.S. economy.
"They want to reunite with their families and contribute to the economy," she said. "Our immigration laws need a road to citizenship."
The cross-country caravan, backed by organized labor, began Saturday. Nearly 1,000 people were to join the ride, with 18 buses planning stops in communities including Washington and New York.
The Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride: http://www.iwfr.org
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Immigrants Travel To Washington To Rally For Broadened Rights |
by Steven Greenhouse
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
28 Sep 2003
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[Photo by Christ Chavez for The New York Times]
Maggie Larson, who flew from Hawaii to Los Angeles to join the freedom ride, remained silent after a border patrol agent asked for her identification documents in Sierra Blanca, Tex.
EL PASO, Sept. 26 — As the bus sped through the New Mexico desert and into West Texas, Federico González talked of his dream, an odd dream for an immigrant from Colombia. He wants to be an F.B.I. agent.
Back home, he had been studying to be a police investigator, but he dropped out of college because he was too poor to pay all the expenses.
Eager to support his girlfriend and infant son, he moved to Arizona and took a job as a roofer, attracted to the relatively high pay by immigrant standards: $9.50 an hour. But the work was grueling, 10-hour days in 100-degree heat. He soon learned there could be a price for protesting harsh conditions.
"They tell me this is the country of freedom," said Mr. González, a passenger in the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, a caravan of buses heading to Washington from 10 cities nationwide to campaign for immigrants' rights. "You're supposed to have the right to speak. But immigrants don't have the right to speak out on the job because they get fired."
Sitting alongside immigrants from Mexico, China, Sudan, the Philippines and elsewhere, Mr. González, 26, helped keep spirits from flagging, banging out Latin rhythms on a drum and bantering nonstop about soccer, salsa and discrimination.
"I can't wait until we get to Washington," he said. "I'm going to be screaming loud. I just want to make sure they listen to us."
The trip, by 900 riders on 18 buses, was inspired by the 1961 freedom rides that sought to integrate bus terminals in the South. Today's riders are pushing for legalizing the status of illegal immigrants, increasing visas for family reunification and stepping up protections for immigrant workers. Mr. González's bus originated in Los Angeles, and he boarded in Tucson after a rally at the Roman Catholic Cathedral that attracted 700 supporters.
"Immigrants do a lot of jobs that nobody else wants to do," he said. "They come here for one reason, to work. They make this place go. They help build America."
When he pushed to form a labor union to improve wages and conditions, he said, his employer dismissed him, suddenly telling him that his papers were not valid, even though his papers had long been accepted.
Mr. González now drives an ice cream truck. "I always heard about the American dream, and I'm still looking for it," he said.
He gestured to another passenger, Dhel Galwak Jourchol, a native of Sudan who immigrated to the United States to escape his country's civil war. "We have a lot in common," Mr. González said. "We both came to America alone, with no friends."
Mr. Jourchol fled Sudan for India, where he earned a law degree, and later the United States granted him refugee status. "Since my childhood, I never have seen peace at all," he said. "The war started in 1983, and we run from the bush to other places. I don't know where a lot of my family is. I don't know if my parents are alive."
Though he is protesting immigration policy, Mr. Jourchol, 32, is a cheerleader for America. "I love the freedom here," he said. "I want to take the system here, and someday establish it in my country. We really appreciate what America has done for us, and we will pay you back someday."
But Mr. Jourchol grumbled about discrimination against immigrants. He applied to work as a corrections officer but was rejected because he was not an American citizen. "I told them I'm qualified," he said. "I'm a law school graduate."
Guillermo Roacho, a diesel mechanic in Los Angeles, also complained about discrimination, saying employers exploited his fellow Mexican immigrants because many did not have legal status and faced deportation if they protested about anything.
"The Mexicans don't have nothing," Mr. Roacho said. "Without legalization, they have no rights."
He said he was so eager to join the bus ride that he told his boss he was going whether or not he was given time off.
Maggie Larson, a rider who immigrated from Malaysia, said she was blessed that she had never faced job discrimination. A housekeeper at the Royal Kona Resort in Hawaii, she said: "I work with people from China, the Philippines, Cambodia, Malaysia. We're very close. We take care of each other. I don't feel discrimination."
Ms. Larson, 41, who flew from Hawaii to Los Angeles to join the ride, said she wanted greater rights for all immigrants so they could share her happiness. She said she hesitated to join the caravan because it meant being away from her 6-year-old.
"Leaving my son for three weeks is a sacrifice, but other immigrants have not seen their families for 10 or 15 years," she said.
Few work harder than Grey Pichinte, a 23-year-old rider who immigrated from El Salvador. From 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. each day, Ms. Pichinte studies computer science at Rio Hondo Community College outside Los Angeles, and then from 5 p.m. until 1:30 a.m. she works as a janitor.
"Immigrants work more than anyone in this country," she said. "They work 16, 18 hours a day."
Tears filled her eyes as she described the riders' visit to Nogales, Ariz., where immigrants told of people who died in the desert seeking to enter the United States. Her parents crossed the desert to escape the violence and poverty in El Salvador, she said, eventually saving enough money to fly her to the United States.
"Immigrants deserve everything because of what they went through," she said. "They crossed the desert. They've made so many sacrifices to seek a better future. There are dumb people who don't see that."
Shirley Smith, a union organizer, was one of the few nonimmigrants on the bus. But she, too, had seen plenty of struggle. She was a high school senior in 1959 when whites in a Dallas suburb sought to prevent her and other blacks from attending a local school.
"They'd throw rocks at us, firecrackers, too," Ms. Smith said.
Ultimately, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. flew to Texas to join that integration struggle. Today's ride, she said, was part of the same fight.
"Before this trip, I didn't realize that the Hispanic people were treated so bad," she said. "All they want is to live like other people. We're still fighting for people's rights. That's what Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez died for."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com |
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Re: Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides Rally -- Monday At 7p.m. |
by Philip
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: -2
01 Oct 2003
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As an immigrant, I resent that the Freedom Rides organizers continue to call illegal immigrants just immigrants, obscuring the fact that illegal immigrants broke the law to live in the U.S., while millions of other legal immigrants like me play by the rules in order to live here. |
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