Andrew Friedman

A Day Without Immigrants? Not a Great Idea.

The movement for immigrant rights has been starting to feel like a movement. Hundreds of thousands of people have been out in the streets, all over the country, condemning legislative attacks on immigrant communities, and supporting a comprehensive immigration reform that offers a path to citizenship for people already here. Everyone is talking about immigration.

There is definately momentum here, but it is important to be careful with it. It can evaporate quickly.

There has been a lot of talk of May 1st being "A Day Without Immigrants," a day where immigrants stay home from work and stay out of stores in order to show their economic power. This seems like a tactical error.

First, a general strike and a nationwide boycott are exceedingly difficult to pull off. It makes more sense to test these tactics and develop capacity at coordinating them before calling a nationwide action. Also, people need to work. They need to pay their rent, feed their children, etc. Taking a day off hurts everyone economically. Also, the tactic is risky. People will likely lose their jobs and the economic hardship will increase. Overall, this effort is likely to fail because of the inexperience of the organizers, the scale of the action, and the fact that it will cost jobs and money and that most immigrants cannot afford to lose.

Even if the action were to succeed, though, it would likely fail to achieve its ostensible goal of promoting a just immigration reform. More likely, it would create a backlash. It places immigrants in opposition to the rest of the country - immigrants against the economy.

Immigrants have many natural allies in the struggle for comprehensive immigration reform. We will need them all to win justice for immigrants.
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Update:
Andrew was asked to write an op-ed on this subject by the New York Daily News.
You can read it on the DMI website.

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Posted at 7:49 AM, Apr 17, 2006 in Immigration
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