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- Afternoon Storms Should Be Slow Movers
- Why Is It So Cold??!!!
- Tropical Storm Bertha
- Hearing Lakeland’s Fireworks Not The Same As Seeing Them, By George
- Time for a patriotic song.
- Crist Engaged To Rome
- Supremes: Crist Erred On Gambling Pact
- Polk Schools Dealing With High Diesel Costs
- Take trolley, streetcar to fireworks
- Isn’t it Fun to Fly?
- Hail, Gusty Winds, Possible Tornado Results From Afternoon Storms
- Portable High Definition Televisions
- Andy Martin—Remember Him?—Gets His Moment In The Sun
- There’s One Behind Every Tree …
- Tornado Warning Up For Sebring Area
Protestors’ reasons for being out varied as vastly as their hometowns.
Emir Stultz ran around the rally holding a Panamanian flag over her head. She’s lived in Tampa since 1985 and said she works for the school district, although she wouldn’t say what her position is.
A U.S. citizen, she won’t directly be affected by immigration legislation, but she is participating for the young people. As it stands, immigrants brought to this country as children can go to K-12 school but are barred either financially or because of their immigration status from college.
“It affects people,” Stultz said. “This isn’t about Mexicans or people from Honduras. This is about human rights, no matter where you’re coming from.”
An undocumented Mexican couple from Clearwater, Elvia Cruz and Asuncion Quesada, brought their three young children to the protest. Quesada applied for residency in 2001 but still is waiting for a response on his status. He works in a hospital laundry room, and Cruz cleans homes for a living—both said their employers gave them the day off.
“We are not robbing,” Cruz said. “We are helping the economy of this country.”
Rodrigo Sanchez, 21, and Omar Vargas, 24, are both Plant City construction workers and both undocumented. They’d like to see some sort of legalization where they can work permanently but travel back and forth to see family in Mexico.
“They want to paint us as terrorists,” Rodrigo said. “It’s a masked racism.”
“All our lives, there will be illegals,” Omar said. “There’s no progress in Latin American countries, they remain in a state of misery, people will continue crossing over.”—Jose Patino
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Posted by Russell Marceau, tampa on 05/01 at 04:24 PM
The immigrants have gotten the short end of the stick. They are realy hard working and kindharted people. Then you have the purtorican and cuban people that are just looking for somthing to gripe about. When you go to a market in plant city and buy your fruit who is there the hard working immigrants not the “give me somthing for free cuban”. It is funny that you can have all these groups for helping races like latinos and blacks with the NAACP and BET but the white male which is becoming the minority has no help at all. We are right there with the immigrants with no rights to speak up.