Unless you live under a rock, you’ve heard about the “Day Without Immigrants” boycotts/protests that went on yesterday all around the country. And if you haven’t, if you do live under a rock, what went on was that tens (or perhaps hundreds) of thousands of illegal (and legal, for Pete’s sake) immigrants staged a boycott of work, school and businesses, to demonstrate the economic might of “undocumented workers”.
As I’ve said before, it is this kind of idiocy that harms the cause instead of helps it. Just when immigration reform is getting some serious attention in Congress, when it is finally being given serious consideration by the people who can effect productive change, an economic boycott is the worst possible message you can send, and at just the wrong time. I’d continue, but Marc Cooper said it better (in an article written a few days before the planned boycott):
With the Senate back in session and struggling to agree on liberalized bipartisan reform, with President Bush finally (but still not forcefully enough) bringing some of his clout to bear, with public opinion polls showing new majorities in favor of much of what immigrant advocates have been lobbying for, I can’t think of a worse time to stage a confrontational boycott like that planned for May 1.
There is a definite time and place for this sort of tactic, and it isn’t here or now. Boycotts are powerful and volatile weapons used as a last resort to bust open dams of dogged resistance. You don’t use them when the political tide is even vaguely flowing in your direction.
Within burgeoning social movements there are always differences of opinion as to what’s the best way to proceed at any given moment. The more successful leaders of the great civil rights movement, for example, could sense when to push, when to pull and when to gracefully glide with the momentum. As a result, they made history while some of their more untethered rivals only made a lot of noise. Likewise today.
It’s no accident that those pushing hardest for the May 1 boycott, many of them marginal protest groups such as ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), have never shown much concern for real-world results, preferring to act out their ideological impulses.
That’s why the larger institutional players in the pro-immigrant movement prefer an after-school (and after-work) rally over an intentionally punitive boycott and walkout. They argue that such an escalation could alienate lawmakers and the public just when political sentiment is shifting more toward immigrants. The positive message of demanding inclusion in the United States would be replaced by a more negative and divisive signal.
Living in the Bay Area, which like the rest of the state has a high concentration of illegal immigrants, I felt the effects of the boycott in my daily life. Restaurants and shops and car washes all over the area were closed voluntarily or were forced to reduce their hours. But my reaction was not what the protestors would probably have wished. A business that was closed as much as admitted that it employs illegal immigrants; while that is no big surprise in this area, and while I am not so impractical as to cut my nose off to spite my face, I will tell you that I will be reconsidering patronizing some of these local businesses in the future. (Via Instapundit)
