END THE ATTACK ON IMMIGRANTS!
DEFEND THE RIGHTS OF ALL WHO LIVE AND WORK IN NEW JERSEY!
STATE-WIDE SPEAK-OUT AND PROTEST MEETING
Saturday March 31 1:00 PM
Paul Robeson CenterBusch Campus
600 Bartholomew Rd
Piscataway, NJ
Immigrants in New Jersey, as in the rest of the United States, are facing increasing attacks. ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids are being stepped up, tearing families apart, detaining and deporting those who have lived here for years. Demagogic town governments are taking anti-immigrant measures. Morristown, for example, is planning to deputize its police as ICE agents. Massive workplace raids like the recent one in New Bedford, Mass. can happen at any time. A New Jersey radio station, 101.5, has called for people to turn in their neighbors as suspected undocumented immigrants, encouraging vigilantism.
The attacks on migrants are attacks on all of us. They are aimed at maintaining an underclass of workers who are too terrified to assert their rights to decent pay, working conditions and living conditions. No one, not even the government, wants to deport 12 million undocumented immigrants who are vital to the economy. The attacks and anti-immigrant laws aim to drive down the cost of all labor, benefiting employers, pitting worker against worker, and hurting us all.
We are fighting back, immigrants and native-born united! We are speaking out against the attacks and the demagogic proposal in towns like Morristown's and Freehold. We are starting to organize a Rapid Response Network which will give aid to those confronting ICE raids or employer abuses of immigrants. We are joining with organizations across the country to organize a Second Great Boycott.
Speak out for the rights of ALL!
We invite your organization's endorsement and participation in this event and in an April 3 noon press conference in New Brunswick
Endorsing organizations(list in formation):
NJ May 1 Coalition
IRATE/First Friends
NJ Civil Rights Defense Committee
Philippine Forum
United Day Laborers of Freehold
And from a New York Times Article, good old Freehold.
PUBLIC LIVES; Back in the Fight He Picked Decades Ago
Article Tools Sponsored By
By LYNDA RICHARDSON
Published: March 17, 2004
CESAR A. PERALES, the president of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, is revved up. But he is not losing his cool. (He is too cool for that.) He is talking about the fund's wranglings in federal court over the attempt by Freehold Borough in Monmouth County, N.J., to prevent day laborers from gathering at a vacant lot to scout for work.
''The question of the treatment of day laborers is so flagrant, I feel it viscerally,'' Mr. Perales says, leaning over to emphasize the point. ''This is to me as horrific as the segregation that the government imposed in the South. We're seeing local governments treating undocumented workers in a similar fashion, marginalizing them, not wanting them to live where they live. This is a fight that will take a long time.''
