Opinion Assignment #1

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Minister Malcolm X were leaders of the civil rights movement. Both King and Malcolm X had very different ways of promoting their message. Malcolm X had a much more extremist approach and King had a much more calm approach. Malcolm X was an Islamic minister, he preached about separatism between blacks and whites. He believed that only through violence would conditions change. King urged non-violence to his followers. In the Letter from Birmingham Jail, King wrote, “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure because Socrates practiced civil disobedience.”

Along with the civil rights movement, other social movements had emerged, such as the anti-Vietnam war movement, women’s movement, the gay rights movement, and the Chicano protest movement. All movements used diverse tactics, such as legal demonstrations, grassroots organizing, congressional lobbying, electoral challenges, civil disobedience, self-immolations, and political violence.

Just like many social movements, the anti-Vietnam war movement had a mix of political notions and visions. According to Wells, “Militant protest, mainly youthful, continued to spread, leading many Americans to wonder whether the war was worth a split society”. Just like the similar division of tactics with Malcolm X and King, many participants questioned its effectiveness, spawning dropouts, hindering the organization of protests and the maintenance of antiwar groups, and aggravating dissension over strategies and tactics. In spring of 1970, President Nixon's invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State shootings sparked the greatest display of campus protest in U.S. history. A national student strike completely shut down over 500 colleges and universities. Other Americans protested in cities across the country; many lobbied White House officials and members of Congress (Wells). The American movement against the Vietnam War was the most successful antiwar movement in U.S. history. The movement played a significant role in constraining the war and was a major factor in the administration's policy reversal in 1968 (Wells).

The Women’s liberation movement had manifested in a split view which was often called as “reform” and “radical.” Despite there differences, they had strong similarities and used the same non-violent tactics to convey their message.

Gay liberation groups saw themselves as one component of the decade’s radicalism and regularly addressed the other issues that were mobilizing American youth. Such as the resolution on the Vietnam war and the draft demanding that “all troops be brought home at once” and that homosexuals in the armed forces “be given Honorable discharges immediately” (Emilio 32). The stonewall riot was the spark that gave “liberation” effort among gay men and women which also contributed to the growth of lesbian-feminist movement.

The Chicano movement was both a civil/human rights struggle and a movement for liberation. According to Rodriguez, “Universities became one of the focal points of protest in the movement. Some of the principal demands were to open up of the doors of
universities to people of color and the establishment of Chicano studies.” The movement demonstrated nonviolent protests.

The protest that I chose to focus on this semester is anti-immigration. The protests such as the Americans for Immigration Control (AIC) is about stopping the millions of illegal aliens who sneak across our border from Mexico every year. The minutemen protestors are against immigration and use non-violent tactics, but in some occasions have turned into violent strategies when confronted with illegal immigrants.

Keeping all these social movements and protests in mind, I believe the most effective strategy is the non-violent protests. Although, violent strategies catch the media’s eye and may be televised more than non-violent ones, I certainly believe that it won’t have an easier way to recruit potential followers. Although, Carson believes that Malcolm X came to realize that nonviolent tactics could be used militantly and King increasingly recognized that mass militancy driven by positive racial consciousness was essential for African-American progress, Carson believed they were both reconcilable. At the time, I believe that Malcolm X and MLK both complimented each other for their efforts to achieve equality between all races. In my opinion, nonviolent protests deems to be appropriate for social movements.

Text-Based Assignment #1

Anti-immigrant movements are not new in the United States. Campaigns against new immigrants have generally coincided with the business cycle, rising in intensity with economic slowdowns, declining in times of prosperity. The U.S. public generally views immigrants with more or less hostility according to the color of their skin and their English-speaking abilities. In times of war, immigrants from nations in conflict with the United States are especially suspect. Such grassroots campaigns that blame immigrants for job losses and declining wage levels, as well as charges that fault the immigrant population for crime and public health crises, have coursed through U.S. history, ebbing and surging in response to economic and political circumstances. The deepening sense of vulnerability experienced by many U.S. citizens today in the face of downsizing, outsourcing, stagnant wages, labor union decline, and the steady loss of medical and retirement benefits explains the path of the anti-immigration movement.


Immigration restriction is increasingly framed as key to homeland and cultural protection. Most of the allied anti-immigrant forces argue that the War on Terror cannot be successfully fought without gaining total control of U.S. borders, downsizing the resident immigrant population, and severely restricting new immigration. These events have affected the progress or path of the anti-immigration movement.

Brief chronology of Anti-immigration
-1882 Chinese Exclusion Act: Barred the entry of any Chinese for 10 years, made permanent in 1904 until it was rescinded in 1943.
-1921 Quota Act: Established first immigration quotas
-1954 Project of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to remove about four million illegal immigrants from the southwestern United States, with a focus on Mexican nationals.
-1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act: Provided amnesty and temporary status to all illegal aliens who had lived in the United States continuously since before Jan. 1, 1982; extended a separate, more lenient amnesty to farm workers; imposed sanctions on employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens; increased inspection and enforcement at U.S. borders.
-1990 Immigration Act: Established limits on immigration but also increased available visas; continued reunification of families as a goal of immigration policy; increased the number of immigrants admitted for employment; gave higher preference to professionals and highly skilled immigrants; provided for admission to U.S. of immigrants from “underrepresented” countries.
-1994 California Proposition 187 was a ballot initiative designed to deny illegal immigrants social services, health care, and public education.
-1996 Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act: Mainly an enforcement measure. Doubled the size of the Border Patrol to 10,000 agents over five years; required construction of 14 miles of fencing at key points on the U.S.-Mexico border; toughened penalties for smuggling and document fraud; tightened sanctions on employers of illegal immigrants; denied government benefits to non-citizens; toughened refugee and asylum provisions; gave immigration officials authority for expedited removal to immediately deport a foreigner at a port of entry; denied public benefits to non-citizens.
-2006 Secure Fence Act - Requires construction of at least 700 miles of fencing along U.S. Mexico border

Mass society theory argues that people protested because they were swept up in irrational crowds, or because they had personality flaws for which they were trying to compensate (G&J, 11). This was considered to be stable and normal and healthy organizations, unlike social movements. Today, having shown that protestors are usually well integrated into their communities and social networks. Scholars reject this theory.

Resource mobilization consist of certain level of resources, especially money in order to sustain it. Researchers argued that there were always enough discontented people in society to fill a protest movement, but what varied over time was the resources available to nourish it (G&J, 11).

Political process theory perceives social movements as primarily political, making demands of the state and asking for changes in laws and policies. When a crisis in the government occurs, such as a result of losing a foreign war, the social movement may rise and its relative success may increase.

Cultural and emotional approaches are seen as efforts to control the direction of social change by controlling a society’s symbols and self-understandings. This involves shaping their own collective identities as social movements. One such example is the animal protection movement, they wanted to give the perception of how nonhuman species were suffering.

I believe the political process theory best describes the anti-immigration movement because they want political leaders to reform the current immigration law by reducing annual legal immigration to numbers which can be readily assimilated. They also want an increase on penalties for those who knowingly transport, recruit, solicit, or hire illegal aliens. They encourage deporting those illegal aliens already in the U.S. and opposing all amnesties & guest worker legislation.