Students defend immigrant rights

Los Angeles (AP):

Emboldened by months of phone calls to lawmakers, hunger strikes and sit-ins, a group of college students and graduates in Los Angeles say they plan to take their fight for immigrant rights to the states and the 2012 election after Senate Republicans blocked a key piece of legislation.

But it won't be easy.

The Senate vote last Saturday to toss the proposal that would have granted young illegal immigrants a route to legal status dealt a harsh blow to student activists who will face an even steeper uphill battle in the next Congress.

Immigrants see rough times ahead in the next two years, with many Republicans vowing to push for tougher immigration enforcement, but they also say Latino voters are getting fed up with lawmakers at a time when they are accruing greater political clout.

"This is a movement," said Nancy Meza, a 23-year-old illegal immigrant and college graduate who wore a University of California, Los Angeles, sweatshirt as she watched the vote on television. "We don't have lobbyists and paid staff. It's a movement by students."

In the hours after the vote, Meza and about 50 other student activists who had gathered at the UCLA Downtown Labor Centre said they would remind Latinos who stood by them, and those who did not, in the next election cycle that they will push for access to financial aid and driver's licences in states more friendly to immigrants like California.

Few said the legislation, many referenced as the Dream Act, had a chance in the next two years with Republicans taking control of the House of Representatives and a shrinking Democratic majority in the Senate. But they said that wouldn't derail the networks they had set up across the country to support illegal immigrant students and help them reveal their status and learn to live unafraid.

Some at the UCLA centre, including university student Leslie Perez, 22, wept as they watched the vote on a big screen.

But minutes after it was over, many donned jackets and umbrellas to take to the rainy streets of Los Angeles, chanting "undocumented and unafraid".