CORRECTION APPENDED

Addressing a meeting of members from over 20 student groups, leaders of Harvard’s Fuerza Latina and Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM) called for a campus-wide walkout on May 1 to protest federal legislation they say is anti-immigration. [See correction.]

The controversial bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in December, would allow illegal immigrants to be prosecuted as criminals and calls for more stringent border security, among other measures.

After receiving a smaller-than-expected student turnout for a national April 10 rally against the legislation, Cristina A. Herndon ’06, former vice president of Fuerza Latina, and SLAM leader Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky ’07 turned to intergroup collaboration in order to most efficiently galvanize support.

The groups’ plan calls for protestors to walk out at 1 p.m. on May Day, May 1, and stage a protest in Harvard Square before moving to a city-wide protest being held in downtown Boston.

According to Gould-Wartofsky, it was the passage in December of the bill, House Resolution 4437, that “was the spark that lit the match.” Though a similar bill has yet to pass the Senate, Herndon and Gould-Wartofsky said that the issue was not dead.

At the meeting, Herndon and Gould-Wartofsky both stressed the importance of activism, especially when it comes to immigration rights.

“The immigrants who are here making this country run, going to school, and going to work are just as much Americans as me,” Gould-Wartofsky said.

The groups said they hope that the walk-out will show the perhaps unseen importance of undocumented immigrants.

Without these workers, “this University wouldn’t last for a day, same thing with the country,” Gould-Wartofsky said.

Herndon also codified the list of grievances, saying that above all the groups supported decriminalization of undocumented immigrants, equal access to education, and equal treatment for immigrants, regardless of their citizenship status.

Many members at the meeting stressed that they are not protesting the University, but rather responding to a national call for student boycott. Many members of ethnic student groups lauded Harvard’s accommodating stance on accepting undocumented aliens.

The larger national effort comes on the heels of a March 25 protest in Los Angeles that attracted over 1 million people and was the largest in California’s history, and another nationwide protest on April 10. In Boston, the protests will be headed by the March 25th Coalition and the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy.

While at the meeting there was disagreement over whether Harvard students should propose their own set of demands or simply follow the efforts of larger organizations, Herndon said that Fuerza Latina has not officially come up with its own separate platform.

“The main consensus seems to be for a humanitarian legislation that respects all immigrants regardless of status,” she said.

Leaders from Fuerza Latina and SLAM were joined by those from the Asian American Women’s Association, the Philippine Forum, and groups from the Graduate School of Education and the Divinity School.

There are over 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

—Staff writer Benjamin L. Weintraub can be reached bweintr@fas.harvard.edu.

CORRECTION: The print and web versions of this article incorrectly state that the student group Fuerza Latina has called for a campus-wide student walkout for May 1. Although some
members of Fuerza are independently helping to plan the protest, the group's
leadership is currently discussing whether to officially sponsor the event.