The marchers of Los Angeles

Published by the Visayan Daily Star Publications, Inc.

NINFA R. LEONARDIA Editor-in-Chief & President

CARLA P. GOMEZ Editor GUILLERMO TEJIDA III Desk Editor NANETTE L. GUADALQUIVER Busines Editor ERIC T. LORETIZO Sports Editor (On Leave) RENE GENOVE Bureau Chief, Dumaguete MAJA P. DELY Advertising Coordinator

CARLOS ANTONIO L. LEONARDIA Administrative Officer

The media lately is full of pictures and scenes showing the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators marching in Los Angeles City, California, protesting a proposed law that would make immigration into the United States more difficult and impose heavier penalties on illegal entrants. At the same time, the 500,000 or more marchers, who reportedly paralyzed the commercial center of the city, are also demanding that amnesty be granted to the undocumented aliens who had entered the United States either surreptitiously as in the case of citizens from neighboring Latin-American states, or those who had come to the country under false pretenses as, say, tourists or visitors or even as patients, and have stayed on with no more intention to return to their own lands.

Although the protestors are said to consist largely of Latin Americans, there are admittedly also thousands of Filipinos among them, who had come to the U.S. under similar circumstances. In fact, their compatriots have coined a term for such people, they call them "T-N-Ts", not the explosive, but for "Tago ng Tago (Hide and hide)", which is what they do to evade immigration authorities who would arrest and deport them when caught.

One cannot help but sympathize with the demonstrators as they articulate their reasons for wanting to stay on. No matter what their nationalities, they, too, like our own fellow Filipinos there, are seeking a better life, after finding no hope to attain such in their own home countries. Statistics from our own Labor Department show that about one million Filipinos now leave yearly for other countries, most planning never to return if they find jobs there. They do so, knowing fully well that they will be violating laws and risking sanctions.

One of the marchers, interviewed, reasoned that they are just doing what the pioneers who settled America had done - landed on its shore without documents. The analogy is rather defective, because those settlers had to contend with a strange and undeveloped land, attacks from the native Indians, cope with hunger and disease, and develop the place into what it is now. But certainly they had the same purposes, to escape from persecution or poverty, with the determination to have a better life.*