On Wednesday, proponents of amnesty and a path to citizenship for illegal aliens held a protest on the Capitol grounds in Washington, DC. I stumbled into it on my way to the nearby Library of Congress.
Mark Krikorian describes the protest as modest (in size, I assume he means). I guess that’s fair. The crowd certainly wasn’t small, but it paled in comparison to recent gatherings such as Glenn Beck’s and the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert event.
The other big difference between those rallies and Wednesday’s was the manufactured feel of the immigration protest. Most of the folks I saw were part of groups of a few dozen, each member wearing a group t-shirt (e.g., mentioning a union). Many seemed to have been bussed in for the event. Indeed, I saw quite a few busses unloading protesters.
There’s nothing wrong with, or necessarily inauthentic about, a bussed-in protester. I can still remember hundreds of busses unloading protesters (nearly all of them African-Americans and many wearing suits on a sweltering August day) at the great civil rights march on Washington in 1963). But those protesters didn’t have the air of being rounded-up for the march. Many of the folks I saw on Wednesday gave me just that impressed.
My impression is partially confirmed by the Media Research Center, which was on hand to talk with some of the protesters. One protester, carrying a placard about Marco Rubio, was asked if she knew who Rubio is. “No,” she answered, “my social worker gave it to me.”
Mark Krikorian is probably correct in believing that the social worker in question is a government employee suppled to the protester by the taxpayers of America. This raises plenty of interesting questions, including this one, asked by Krikorian: Does anyone think the person who gave this protester her sign is part of a profession that will rigorously enforce GOP-crafted restrictions on welfare access by the “provisional” amnesty recipients?
But I want to raise a different, though not unrelated question. Does anyone see future conservative voters in a sea of immigrants that takes its cues from “civil rights” organizers, union bosses, and left-wing social workers? Or do you see, as I do, millions of new voters who, like waves of immigrants before them, will vote en masse as directed by bosses whose allegiance is to the Democratic party?
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