Marching Away from Citizenship

Mark Krikorian throws out some numbers. I hadn't realized they were this striking:

The number of participants in the Los Angeles May Day illegal-alien marches:

2006: 500,000

2007: 35,000

2008: 8,500

In Chicago:

2006: 400,000

2007: 150,000

2008: 15,000

I'm sure there is more than one reason for this, but surely participant interest has to be near the top of the list. Yet what's the proximate cause of such a serious crash? Perhaps illegals are settling into the post-political idea that as long as nobody's going to mess with you, citizenship is beside the point. Tocqueville's classic concern that Americans would atrophy as public participants in favor of a pillowy-soft centralized despotism receives an interesting new twist under the pseudo-open borders regime we've put in place. Will an underclass of the immigrant uninvolved deepen over time, or will the natives go un-native, gradually joining their new neighbors in the abandonment of citizenship?

Comments

[Dara]

If I had to bet I'd lay my money on the increasing remoteness of the possibility of conmprehensive immigration reform at the national level. If you're not marching for a particular legislative goal but rather for something vague like "recognition", you're much less likely to risk going to an event that's just asking for an ICE raid.

As far as the "post-political" thing goes: scholarship of the last 10 years or so has veered sharply away from the "settler/sojourner" dichotomy and toward the idea of immigrants as "transnational"--maintaining connections to their home communities and developing them in places of settlement simultaneously. It's a good case study in applied postmodernism, but I don't buy it entirely because it seems to punt the question of loyalty/belonging entirely. I'd post about this but I'm saving it for my senior essay.