Massive protest in LA over anti-immigration proposals

The march, which far exceeded organisers' expectations and easily dwarfed anything seen during the civil rights movement or the Vietnam War, was a stunning slap in the face for the country's vocal anti-immigrant lobby and set the stage for what is likely to be an electric debate in the Senate this week on what may emerge as the main issue in November's mid-term elections.

Helicopter footage of the march showed demonstrators packed into as many as two dozen city blocks around Los Angeles's City Hall. Crowd estimates ranged from half a million to more than a million. The protesters chanted workers' rights slogans in English and Spanish, waved flags from America, Mexico, Guatemala and elsewhere, and showed the face of a joyously multicultural America very different from the predominantly white, often anger-tinged anti-immigration movement.

LA's mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, the son of Mexican immigrants and a former labour activist, told the crowd: "We cannot criminalise people who are working, people who are contributing to our economy and contributing to the nation."

The march cut across party and class lines, and included whites, Latinos and Asians. It was the largest of a series of protest marches to have taken place across the United States in the past few days, all of them called in reaction to a bill passed in the House of Representatives last December that would reclassify illegal immigrants as criminal felons and call for the construction of a 700-mile wall stretching a third of the way along the US-Mexico border between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.

That bill, written and supported by the House's radical brand of Republicans, was never likely to become law but was designed, in the run-up to the election, to appeal to the country's growing fear and resentment of an unprecedented influx of Mexicans and other foreign nationals.

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