Pakistani store owners in a section of Brooklyn, a borough of New York City, pulled down their shutters on Monday in solidarity with striking immigrant workers across the United States.
They were not only backing fellow immigrants' struggle for the grant of rights but also expressing their disdain over the anti-immigrant legislation that passed the US House of Representatives on December 16.
More than 100 businesses from the Coney Island Avenue Brooklyn, known as Little Pakistan, closed down for about 40 minutes. Among them were Pakistani, Russian and Mexican owned restaurants, pharmacies, barbershops, beauty parlours, travel shops, call centres, and cell phone stores, a Bangladeshi wholesale distributor, and a Muslim bookstore.
The initial plan was just to shutter their stores, but then a group of about 50 Mexicans and Central Americans, who work in the neighbouring section of Brooklyn marched over to protest with them.
They chanted slogans in unison as Pakistanis and Bangladeshis linked arms with the Latinos and whites from the neighbourhood, among them the Irish American owners of a plumbing supply store on Coney Island Avenue that also closed down.
They were cheered by passing drivers and big rigs blasting their horns in support.
In its comments, The Village Voice, a liberal newspaper, said: "It wasn't the biggest demonstration on May 1. But the decision of so many South Asians here to step out of their stores was significant, since this is a community which has already experienced firsthand the impact of mass deportations."
"Following 9-11, the Department of Homeland Security set up a special registration programme requiring immigrants from 25 countries "24 of them Muslim" to register with the FBI and immigration officials.
"More than 13,000 Muslims were put into deportation proceedings. Many others left for fear of being locked up in detention centres."
"We've already taken the hit," Mohammed Razvi, executive director of the Council of Peoples Organisation (COPO), a social service group that serves South Asians and other immigrants in the community, was quoted as saying.
In Brooklyn alone, Razvi estimated some 20,000 South Asians had left since the special registration programme was implemented. "If you go though my neighbourhood you see Russian stores opening up because there were vacancies. That's the demographic shift that's happened here.
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