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The author tells the stories of immigrant workers taking part in the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride (IWFR) of 2003, and explains what the organizers of the IWFR hope to achieve. The IWFR's ambitious five-point agenda reflects the demands of a diverse immigrant constituency: a new legalization process for undocumented workers, an accessible path to citizenship, a commitment to family reunification for immigrants waiting for relatives abroad, extension of labor protections to all workers and strengthening of civil rights and liberties to insure equal treatment of immigrants. For two weeks, buses from ten cities hit the road, bound for Washington, DC, then a rally in Flushing Meadows, Queens, on October 4, where the crowd surged to 100,000, according to organizers. It's easy to become preoccupied with isolated flash points, harder to grapple with the insidious structures of racism that mold so much of the daily experience of immigrants and African-Americans. The vast diversity of today's immigrants further complicates the picture. The IWRF is a complex call for a new civil rights charter that includes the foreign-born. Employers are often the frontline enemy in this racialized reality. In the 1960s, and throughout US history, employers have used racial and ethnic differences to divide workers and weaken their organizing. In recent years, the arsenal available to employers aiming to exploit divisions among workers has been expanding. Under the Patriot Act the riders -- regardless of their place of birth or immigration status -- could have been detained if the government had somehow deemed their mission subversive. At the core of the IWFR is an evolving and sometimes rocky relationship between organized labor and the broader immigrant rights community, which have strong common interests but also some different priorities.
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