U.S. Immigrants To Boycott on May 1st

[Japher]

I hear they all are being required to work overtime today to make up for their laziness yesterday

[Docfeelgood]

non legal persons protesting that they want to work in the USA by boycotting going to work??????

WTF is wrong with theses people?

[Whoha]

Originally posted by Oerdin
I was in eastern LA county today I didn't notice much different other then the traffic was lighter then normal. I did notice a few of those small mom and pop place closed but not to many. I fact Montebello (where I was today) has a huge immigrant community but most of them are from eastern Europe or East Asia and are made up of people who came here legally. They didn't seem to have much sympathy for illegal aliens at least judging by the comments people were shouting at the TV in the Armenian restaurant I ate lunch at today.

sigAlert has some interesting pictures I'm taking. I'll need another boycott to determine for sure though. all green in Greater-LA is supposedly a rare event indeed.

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Japher
I hear they all are being required to work overtime today to make up for their laziness yesterday

[Q Classic]

I'll have to say, this whole "Day Without Immigrants" business didn't effect me except in two tiny ways:

1. Made me immediately less sympathetic to them, because they clogged the El train I was on.

2. Made me think that this was nothing more than arrogant, attention-grabbing masturbatory noisemaking, since really, for my lunch options, all it did was close one restaurant that I didn't like in the first place, while leaving every other one that I do like... open. And normal.

===

So, yeah. As far as these protests go, a day without immigrants, at least for me, is no different from a day with immigrants. (Largely because the immigrants that I do deal with seemed to feel that getting paid was slightly more important.

Y'know, in the way that Booker T. Washington suggested that whole Atlanta Compromise thing. First you get the money, then you get the power...

Kinda like what slants and desis are doing.)

[Imran Siddiqui]

For Q:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-05-01-immigration-asians_x.htm

In New York City's Chinatown, Asian immigrants held hands and formed a "human chain" at 12:16 p.m. Monday to mark the day, Dec. 16, when the House of Representatives voted for a bill that would make illegal immigrants felons.

In Philadelphia, Korean activists held a forum on immigration. In Los Angeles, they encouraged employers to let workers take the day off to join a march down Wilshire Boulevard.

Latinos have been the face of recent immigration rallies, but Asians and Asian-Americans are increasingly joining the protests or taking their own approach. They are speaking out on issues such as reducing the wait times for visas for family members or green cards for skilled workers.

"This is a turning point for them. More Asians are joining into this larger civil rights movement," says Pueng Vongs, an editor at New America Media, a consortium of ethnic news media.

"Our community has been fairly slow to mobilize, but we are definitely working together now," says Daniel Huang, policy advocate for the Asian Pacific American Legal Center. He says Spanish radio stations helped Latinos organize quickly for rallies, but varying languages mean it's harder to reach Asians that way.

People of Asian ancestry were 13% of the 11.1 million undocumented population in a 2005 Census survey, says Jeffrey Passel, senior research associate at the Pew Hispanic Center. Four countries — China, India, the Philippines and South Korea — account for most of them.

Korean-Americans have been among the most vocal Asians in the immigration debate, Huang says.

"We have a particularly large undocumented population," says Eun Sook Lee, director of the National Korean-American Service and Education Consortium. She says 18% of the Korean population in the USA is undocumented.

Vongs says Korean-American businesspeople, who hire substantial numbers of Latinos, are concerned about penalties they could face as employers.

The Korean Apparel Manufacturers Association in Los Angeles sent a memo to its 1,000 members urging them to allow workers to take Monday off.

"We don't want this to be a racial issue," says Mike Lee, the group's president, noting that many of the employers are Korean-American but the workers are Latino. Lee, a former U.S. Army officer who owns an apparel factory, joined a march Monday, as did all his Latino workers. Only a handful of his Asian workers took the day off.

The Chinese community has been less active until recent weeks, Huang says, noting their large turnout at rallies April 10.

"Chinese are sort of a quiet, conservative community," says Cat Chao, host of the radio call-in show Rush Hour on Chinese-language station KAZN in Los Angeles. She says when Latinos organized the initial protests, many of her callers admired their activism. Now, she says, many say the activists have gone too far and call Monday's boycott too "aggressive."

Aman Kapoor, a software programmer from India at Florida State University, didn't join the boycott. His venue: the Web. Four months ago, he posted a message about his years-long, ongoing wait for a green card, which documents an immigrant's permanent legal residence in the USA. He says 3,400 workers like him, who have H-1B visas to take "highly skilled" jobs employers couldn't otherwise fill, formed Immigration Voice. Most come from India or China.

"We don't know the system here," Kapoor says, explaining why the group hired the lobbying firm Quinn Gillespie & Associates. The firm is helping the group urge senators to expedite the green-card process and change rules so some applicants enduring a long wait could change jobs.

More than other immigrants, Asians tend to be well-educated, professionally employed and in the USA legally, Passel says. About 10% of the Asian and Pacific-Islander population in the USA is undocumented, compared with 19% of the Latino population, he says.

The difference in legal status helps explain why the Asian community is less concerned than Latinos about legalization, says Karin Wang, an attorney for the Asian Pacific American Legal Center.

In a March poll of 800 legal immigrants by New America Media, 39% of Asian-Americans favored deporting all illegal immigrants; 9% of Latinos supported the idea. Forty-seven percent of Asian-Americans favored erecting a wall along sections of the U.S.-Mexican border; 7% of Latinos did.

Vongs says Asian immigrants are more concerned about human trafficking, the smuggling of people into the country for forced labor, sexual exploitation or other illicit purposes. "The highest number of people trafficked are Asian," she says. "It's primarily for the sex trade."

Civil liberties is another issue, Huang says. He says the House bill would make some misdemeanors, including drunken driving, a reason to deport someone. That could leave some people in U.S. prisons indefinitely because some Asian countries — Vietnam, Laos and China — permit few deportees to return.

Reuniting families is another concern of Asian-Americans. Huang says children or spouses of U.S. citizens wait one to two years for a visa to the USA, but parents, siblings and other relatives wait five to 12 years.

[Q Classic]

Jeebus H. Christ.

It looks like I forgot to fill out a TPS form and missed the fecking memo.

That said, I stand by most of my statements. I.E., Asians tend to be quieter, tend to believe more in the tenets of the Atlanta Compromise, tend to think that getting paid is slightly better than wasting a day demonstrating for no real purpose...

...and tend to not want to make this a cultural issue.

More power to the Latinos for making a Spanish-language version of the national anthem; it's been done before. But was it wise? I tend to think that it isn't, at least not at this juncture. They want to be part of this nation, sure. That's great. But to do so in a divisive manner such as that? To exclude the majority of Americans who don't speak Spanish? To make it a cultural argument, rather than one focused around rights?

Foolishness.

[Dis]

learn to speak English. That's my motto.

My immigrant friends have done so, why can't they?

I just don't care for this attitude. They think they can come in and change this country into a spanish speaking country. Though I think all the spanish signs are cute, actually. But just a waste of taxpayer money.

And they get upset when you can't speak spanish. I'm just glad I don't work in casinos. They expect you to speak spanish, which is unreasonable. I had one mexican tell a friend of mine that she works in an international city and should know how to speak spanish. If that was the case, she should speaking Chinese and Japanese. As we have more tourists from those countries.

[Impaler[WrG]]

I live in Tucson Arizona ware Hispanics are practicaly equal in number to "Anglos" and at my work (a plastic factory) we had no-one missing on monday. Overall their seemed to be very little effect. Only a few of my Hispanic co-workers were even aware of the Strike, thouse that were said they supported it but none were partispating.

I think that the lack of minority status on the part of the Hispanic community keeps them from feeling leftout or antagonized to go on strikes. When its likly that your boss and your childs teacher are the same ethnicity as you and theirs a lot less pathos involved in taking the day off and "sticking it to the (white) man".

[chequita guevara]

Nearly half a million people marched in Chicago, and I missed it.

[Vince278]

Thought that was LA. The national total was just over a million.

[Donegeal]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Nearly half a million people marched in Chicago, and I missed it.

Half a million expected... 300,000 were the estimates for protesters...

[Dis]

I should have went shopping yesterday after all. My mom was in the walmart, and it was completely empty. Normally it's full of mexicans. Not that I have anything against mexicans. it's just the kids go screaming down the aisles all the time. I wish they had stores for adults only. Actually we do have those stores in my city, but they don't sell anything useful like walmart.

[Q Classic]

Surprisingly, even though half a million may have marched in Chicago, it didn't affect me, nor did I notice it.

Mainly because I decided that working would be slightly more important than demonstrating. Then again, I'm a second-generation immigrant and already a citizen, so~

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by Dis
I should have went shopping yesterday after all. My mom was in the walmart, and it was completely empty. Normally it's full of mexicans. Not that I have anything against mexicans. it's just the kids go screaming down the aisles all the time. I wish they had stores for adults only. Actually we do have those stores in my city, but they don't sell anything useful like walmart.

Yeah, but you could get a brand new dildo.