I walked down Vernor with my sisters and there were already more Brown faces than I’d ever seen in one place. The crowd started at the I-75 service drive (the one that slices right through the neighborhood), but the official march starting point wasn’t for another mile and a half. When we finally made it there, the numbers were mind-boggling. As we headed up Vernor, it seemed like more and more people just kept appearing. By the time we got to the viaduct at the old Michigan Central Depot, I couldn’t see the end of the line. The Free Press later reported 50,000 marched!

In the crazy times in which we live, the key thing is to assign blame and duck responsibility. The current legislature, the Bush administration, the courts, the institutions that supposedly hold all the cards are either unable or unwilling to admit that the policies in place have become unacceptable.

The easiest people to scapegoat are those who are perceived as having no voice—immigrants, prisoners, children, and the poor. Legislation that was proposed in Congress, including HR 4437 and the so-called “compromise bill,” are some of the most hateful and destructive measure to come around since California’s Proposition 187, which was intended to deny immigrants social services, health care, and public education.

HR4437, which passed the House but has been sidelined in favor of a “compromise” bill, would have immediately made being in the U.S. illegally an aggravated felony.

The new proposed bill is little better, as it would allow indefinite detention for immigrants, revokes due process for immigrants, and, like HR 4437, criminalizes “illegal presence” in the U.S.

We have to look at what’s going on to put these events in some sort of perspective. NAFTA, GATT and other free trade agreements have gutted the economies of pretty much everything south of Texas. There is virtually no way to make a living in Latin America, except to work in sweatshops for extremely depressed wages. Latin American workers have little recourse but to come to the US.

But then they get here, and though most people don’t think it’s going to be easy, the reality is alarming. There is little work that provides wages decent enough to live on, and then send some money back home. The schools in which people enroll their kids lack resources, the clinics at which they seek health care lack resources, the jobs they work lack safety or security—it turns out that the only thing that comes in abundance here is lack.

These are conditions that immigrants have faced since time out of mind. What’s new, however, is the vicious criminalization of people who are coming illegally. As prisons become more and more profitable, it seems likely that felons will be in higher demand. The obvious fodders for them are illegal immigrants and young people.

The march in Detroit was also remarkable for that aspect – it was a young people’s march. There were viejitos and middle-aged blue-collar workers, but it was overwhelmingly young people and their babies. The same young people who are demonized as gangsters and dropouts were marching down Michigan Avenue on a beautiful spring morning. The thousands of people who surrounded the McNamara Federal Building were not there to ask for handouts. They were there, finally, to demand some simple human respect.

Elisa Gurule lives and works in Detroit and has a small child. She can be contacted at ehgurule (at) hotmail (dot) com