May 1 Immigration Demonstrations Test Organizers' Online Strategy

 They did it in Moldova. They did it with the Tea Parties. Can they do it with immigration reform?

Immigration reform advocates are planning a “national day of action” for tomorrow May 1, and hoping to tap the power of Twitter and text messaging to spread the word.

They’re trying to draw big crowds to marches they’ve planned around the country, and they’re also organizing call-in armies so they can light up legislators’ phone banks.

The blog of the Fair Immigration Reform Movement asks today: “May Day Marches—Where Will you Be?”

Part of this organizing is being done through traditional means. Word-of-mouth, community meetings, good old fashioned press releases, media appearances, etc. But the immigration reform movement also wants to leverage online and cell technology.

One example is a new text messaging service, with which you can join the movement by typing the message “justice” (or “justicia” for Spanish) to the number 69866. The reply asks for your zip code and e-mail address in order to send you information on local events linked to rallying for immigration reform.

There are videos on YouTube promoting this service, including a clever Spanish-language video called “Congress, can you hear me now?” as well as posts on Twitter referencing immigration (with the Twitter shorthand for a tag ”#” as a prefix: ”#immigration.”

Advocates will be live-blogging from the marches, and in Los Angeles, demonstrators with CHIRLA (Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles) and the Multiethnic Immigrant Worker Organizing Network plan to unveil a giant postcard to President Barack Obama. The event will be fed to Internet viewers via YouTube.

This focus on online organizing comes after immigration reform advocates acknowledged their backwardness in this area compared to their opponents: immigration restrictionists and nativists who helped defeat immigration reform in 2007 with disciplined, multi-platform tech-savvy organizing.

A study by the New York-based nonprofit The Opportunity Agenda in mid-2007 found that social networking sites were skewed to anti-immigration activists.

On Facebook, pro-immigration groups had some 20,000 members but anti-immigration groups had 39,000. Plus, anti-immigrant pages on Facebook “owned” the term immigration, meaning searches using that word tended to lead to anti-immigration content. A similar trend was detected on YouTube.

Clearly, part of the strategy now is to even the playing field online. It may already be working. A Twitter search today for the tag ”#immigration” delivered no anti-immigrant posts in the first 15 results, but several promoting May Day actions.

But the ultimate goal is to harness the power of Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to get people to act, either by participating in demonstrations or calling lawmakers. It’ll be interesting to see whether May Day turnout can beat Tea Party turnout.