1M Immigrants Skip Work for Demonstration

Participants wear T-shirts with a message opposing immigration reform bill HR 4437 at Fiesta Broadway, an annual Latino celebration which closes off several blocks of the downtown area Sunday, April 30, 2006, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Phil McCarten) (Phil Mccarten - AP)

"If I lose my job, it's worth it," said Jose Cruz, an immigrant from El Salvador who protested with several thousand others in the rural Florida city of Homestead rather than work his construction job. "It's worth losing several jobs to get my papers."

But the effect was minimal in some places. On Manhattan's busy 14th Street, only a few shops were closed, including a Spanish-language bookstore and a tiny Latin American restaurant.

In Las Vegas, major casino companies Harrah's Entertainment Inc., MGM Mirage Inc., Wynn Resorts Ltd. and Station Casinos Inc. said nearly all 60,000 employees reported to work. Executives and the union representing cooks, maids and housekeepers on the Las Vegas Strip had urged employees to work but also join an evening rally.

The impact on some school systems was significant. In the sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District, which is 73 percent Hispanic, about 72,000 middle and high school students were absent _ roughly one in every four.

In San Francisco, Benita Olmedo pulled her 11-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son from school.

"I want my children to know their mother is not a criminal," said Olmedo, a nanny who came here illegally in 1986 from Mexico. "I want them to be as strong I am. This shows our strength."

Truck traffic at the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach _ the nation's largest port complex _ was off 90 percent, said spokeswoman Theresa Adams Lopez.

Some of the rallies drew small numbers of counter-protesters, including one in Pensacola, Fla.

"You should send all of the 13 million aliens home, then you take all of the welfare recipients who are taking a free check and make them do those jobs," said Jack Culberson, a retired Army colonel who attended the Pensacola rally. "It's as simple as that."

Jesse Hernandez, who owns a Birmingham, Ala., company that supplies Hispanic laborers to companies around the Southeast, shut down his four-person office in solidarity with the demonstrations.

"Unfortunately," he said, "human nature is that you don't really know what you have until you don't have it."

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Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Laura Wides-Munoz in Homestead, Fla.; Jon Sarche in Denver; Alex Veiga in Long Beach, Calif.; Andrew Dalton and Christina Almeida in Los Angeles; Jay Reeves in Birmingham, Ala.; Jordan Robertson in San Francisco.