The Love Park immigration demonstration I posted about yesterday was reported in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.

Philadelphia Managing Director Pedro Ramos told the crowd: "This is a city that welcomes immigrants. This is a city that appreciates immigrants. This community is much better, much stronger, with all of us in it."

Yesterday's demonstrations followed a weekend of rallies in 10 states, intended to send a message to Congress about pending changes to immigration laws.

Immigrants were brought together by a bill in Congress that would crack down on those in the country illegally, along with their employers and groups that help them, as well as authorize the construction of a 700-mile fence on the Mexican border.

Those among the estimated 7,000 at the Philadelphia rally largely focused on their fear of and distaste for a Republican-backed bill in the House of Representatives that they said runs against the fiber of a nation built by immigrants.

What's amazing to me is that if we assume the police estimate was right, Philadelphia's demo might have been larger than Los Angeles!

Here's Mickey Kaus:

today's Los Angeles pro-immigrant demonstration--scheduled for 5:00 in the evening--was shockingly small. It filled an interesection and a little park in the Olvera St. section. That's about it. Anybody who says there were more than 12,000 people there is full of it! I'd say 5,000-8,000. ... The organizers certainly cut down on the backlash potential.

...a bust attendance-wise. But I'm still glad I went. This event stood out as a sharp contrast to the more spectacular protests elsewhere in the country. No yelling, chanting or megaphones, and the attendees with were all uniformly nice and well-behaved. Their message, however misguided I feel it to be, was free of the communist/socialist/Che/anarchist garbage seen at other events.

But in Kansas, leftist political causes seemed to be at the top of the agenda:

....keynote speaker for the event, attorney Pedro Irigonegaray, bashed the war in Iraq, the Bush adminstration's handling of hurricane Katrina and even brought up the Wilson/Libby/Plamegate during his 10 minute speech.

What stood out the most for me yesterday (and what I see confirmed by most of the reports from other cities) is the contrast between the Hispanic demonstrators and their white supporters. I don't mean to put down the white people because of their race (and this necessarily involves generalization), but they're just not helping the cause of the people they claim to support. They strike me as mostly career activists -- loud, shrill, uncouth, and unreasonable.

(The kind of people whose 2004 pre-election activities in New York were so helpful to Karl Rove. . .)

UPDATE: Via Glenn Reynolds, there's this from James Lileks:

If you want to see the Democrats crack down on illegals, convince a million illegals to demonstrate on the Fourth of July with pictures of George Washington, playing Irving Berlin tunes in the Mexicali style.