Latino leaders planning new push for immigration bill

“Fear, denigration, abuse: those are words that resonate with our community, particularly when it comes to immigration,” Janet Murguía, the president of NCLR, said in a speech on Monday.

She said the travails of millions of immigrants without legal status were widely affecting Latino neighborhoods, making them feel besieged the way African-Americans did during the civil rights era of the 1960s. Illegal immigrants, she said, were vulnerable to wage discrimination, sexual attack in the workplace, even theft when they cash their paychecks, since many do not have bank accounts.

While most of those in NCLR are citizens who have been in the United States for years, if not generations, community leaders here said that Republican advocacy last year of “self-deportation” for immigrants who are here illegally was offensive and heightened their personal identification with those immigrants…

In an interview, Ms. Murguía said the “silver lining” in the immigration debate had been that it erased sometimes sharp differences between Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans and other Latino groups in different regions of the country. “The attacks on our larger Latino family has been unifying and galvanizing for us,” she said.