Students, activists plan to march against House bill.

 

Some students at El Paso's Jefferson High School, inspired by student walkouts this week in Southern California, say they'll walk out at 1:30 p.m. today and march to Washington Park to protest the U.S. House-passed immigration reform bill that calls for a 700-mile border fence and for making it a felony to be or to assist an illegal immigrant.

An unidentified Jefferson High School senior told the El Paso Times he wasn't sure how many students would join the walkout because school administrators had threatened to suspend any students who participate. School administrators couldn't be reached for comment, the El Paso Times reported today on its Web site.

And immigrant rights activists hope to expand an already planned march scheduled for farm workers to mark Cesar Chavez Day on Friday to include a protest against the enforcement-oriented House bill, the Times reported.

Manuel Velez, an English teacher at El Paso Community College and coordinator of the school's Chicano Studies program, told the Times he expects from 500 to 600 people to take part in Friday's march, which is scheduled to take off at 10 a.m. from San Jacinto Plaza downtown and march to the Sin Fronteras farm worker center at 201 Ninth Avenue.

Meanwhile, the Times cited a national poll released on Tuesday of legal immigrants who favored legislation friendly to immigrants, even those who are here illegally.

The poll was conducted by Bendixen & Associates for New America Media, a national group of ethnic news organizations, the Times reported.

The survey polled 800 legal immigrants in 47 states during February and March and found that only 10 percent approved of the enforcement-oriented House bill, while 54 percent of those polled believed the current immigration debate was unfair and based on misinformation, the Times said.

A majority of those polled, according to the Times, favored the Senate bill co-sponsored by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., that calls for temporary work permits for undocumented immigrants who then could apply for legal status (a green card) after a waiting period and paying a fine.

A bill similar to the McCain-Kennedy legislation is being debated this week in the U.S. Senate after being approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Just as two days of student walkouts from Southern California to Texas were winding down -- according to this story from The Associated Press -- the wave of protest seems a little late and low key in El Paso, which you might expect would be Ground Zero in the growing national debate over immigration reform.

Maybe El Paso hasn't been plugged into the national Spanish-language radio effort that has been drumming up support for widescale protests across the country for several weeks now, according to this story by The Associated Press.

Or maybe El Paso -- where, according to the El Paso Times, an estimated one-third of the city's population was born in Mexico -- people have lived with the ambiguous conditions of the border for so long, they just don't too excited about issues the rest of the country is just beginning to notice.

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