As President Obama arrived at the Las Vegas high school where he gave a speech about his sweeping immigration reform on Friday, his motorcade passed dueling street demonstrations that captured just how divided America is on immigration reform.
Crowds engaged in civil (and occasionally uncivil) disobedience shouted each other down and heckled people arriving to the event. About sixty protesters waved signs reading “No Amnesty,” “Illegal Prez,” and “Impeach Obama.” They stood across the street from a crowd of mostly Hispanic demonstrators who seemed to want Obama to go further. They held signs that read “Reunite The Families,” and “Obama, What About My Mama?” African American men with signs reading “We Support You Obama” exchanged words with opponents armed with multiple megaphones. Police monitored the situation, which never verged on violence, but often descended into verbal ugliness.
In front of a banner that read “FIRE OBAMA” with a hammer and sickle for an “O,” one protester yelled: “We the people are tired of Obama, or as I like to call him, Benito Obama!”
Two African American men yelled, “Stop hating!” “Who does that to your President?”
When Hispanic families in formal attire passed en route to the event, hecklers yelled, “Here come your taxpayer dollars at work!” Other protesters joined in with, “There’s plenty more where that came from!” “Go home!” and “You don’t deserve to be an American!”
Immigration reform supporters on the periphery of the protest occasionally entered the fray, but most of them stayed on the sidelines, aghast. Marty Mares, a retired construction worker, told the Guardian, “It makes me sick. These people are complaining about the jobs … go over there and ask them, ‘Okay, which one of you are ready to pick tomatoes? Which one of you are ready to start doing that gardening work? Which one of you are ready to do all these jobs that they work hard at.”
“I’m so disappointed America has changed,” Mares added. “They don’t care about the poor people anymore.”
One protester, Garrett Adams, said his wife struggled to find work for six months and he blamed undocumented immigrants for that. “We’ve got people living on the streets, we’ve got veterans coming back. We can’t afford this. My wife couldn’t even find part-time minimum wage work,” he said.
Kim Blandino, a retired construction worker from Montana, waved an upside-down American flag in reference to the maritime signal for distress. “We are a nation in distress,” he told the Guardian.
Eyeing this reporter’s pen, Blandino made another metaphor, one regarding the President’s decision to bypass Congress. “If I wanted to use your pen I would say, ‘Sir, can I borrow your pen?’ I wouldn’t just snatch it out of your hand, would I? That would be a breach.”
In addition to requisite chants of “USA! USA!” some protesters demonstrating against the president’s decision shouted, “Obama, escucha [listen], you really screwed the pooch-a!”
On the opposite side of the street, a group of Hispanics chanted in Spanish: “Obama, listen, we are in the fight!”
That prompted a man with a megaphone to yell, “Speak English, dummy!”
“Tell your mama to stay where she’s at!” another protester added. Behind the furious exchange, a pile of unused signs included a poster of Obama in Joker makeup with the words “Cult Leader” underneath.
Some protesters blamed the President for America’s declining global stature. “We used to be respected,” Garrett Adams said. “We controlled all the situations in the world as far as terrorism, monetary issues go. [Obama] just wants to bow down and give everything away in order to be equal with everybody.”
A particularly tense exchange occurred when one protester, Blandino, confronted two African American men who argued that, “If everybody wasn’t so busy hating this would be a better America.” These two men pointed out that President George W Bush used executive action too. Blandino replied, “You’re taking his talking points and just regurgitating them like a parrot or a sheep.”
“Okay, now you’re calling us animals,” one of the men said.
“We’re supposed to be human beings with brains,” Blandino said.
One of the few (if not the only) Hispanic anti-immigration demonstrators, Raul Rodriguez Jr, told the Guardian, “I’m an American of Mexican descent. My parents were born here. I think it’s wrong for Obama to let these illegal aliens to come into this country without going through the process.”
When pressured to provide an alternative remedy to America’s immigration crisis, Rodriquez suggested a plan that sounded oddly similar to Obama’s. “I think they ought to secure the border first,” he said. “Once they secure the border then they should have people who are here illegally sign up, and those that have criminal records get deported, those that don’t can apply for citizenship.”
At one point during Blandino’s terse exchange with the African American men, a conversation focused on the protesters’ undeniable hatred for the president, an undocumented immigrant named Oscar Chavira said: “It’s not hate to Obama; it’s hate to illegals like me. We’re coming to work. We’re not coming to hurt you.”
A young South Korean man named Ju Hong – who also emigrated to the United States illegally – said: “There’s a lot of violence and poverty forcing migration to America.”
Although polls show the majority of Americans support immigration reform, opponents solidly outnumbered advocates outside the President’s event.
As Blandino retreated back to the protesters’ side of the street, Rodriguez used his megaphone to say, “I don’t care if you’re Chinese, Korean, Mexican, Honduran or whatever – we have a process and these people aren’t going through the process.”
