At 8am on a Bank Holiday Monday, Central London is a different world. However, me and 200 other volunteers weren’t there to soak in an eerily silent Hyde Park, or gawp at a tourist-free Buckingham Palace. We were there to tie up the banners, hand out the leaflets, carry the placards, and all the little tasks that go on behind the scenes when you're preparing for a march and rally through the heart of Westminster for 18,000 people.

‘Strangers to Citizens’ is a campaign for the rights of migrants, organised by the Citizen Organising Foundation. It calls for a path to earned amnesty for those people who, for various and often completely innocent reasons, have fallen into the shadowy categorisation of ‘illegal immigrants’. These people, an estimated 750,000 living and working beside us, have endured much: leaving their homelands, trying to settle and to make a living while having no protection from the law or from employers, and citizenship for them will not be cheap either. The proposed amnesty would require four years of residence, a clean criminal record, good English and character references, but from what I saw on Monday so many have already more than ‘earned’ their right to be British.

After exiting a boisterous Gospel service, the Bengali drummers and their followers surged past us at a bizarre ‘crossroads-junction’ of marches, and while our African dancers waited politely at the traffic lights, eventually we couldn’t hold the tide of banners, placards and, yes, union jacks, from flooding into what was now a living orange river. Just as we were passing Parliament Sq (Hi, Tamils! Solidarity!?), the cavalry arrived. Passing over the top of Westminster Bridge, we saw a solitary, colourful Spanish banner, and then pouring out behind it, literally thousands of Latin Americans, drumming, dancing, and whistling their traditional Chullo hats off. The merging of the different marches from 6 separate services and rallies across London was really something incredible to see.

Playing ‘guess the nationality’ as the march went by (Congolese! Chinese! Bolivian! Polish! Zimbabwean! Wait, is that a 1970s Iranian flag?) you were struck by the massive base of support, from a population that is too often invisible to the public eye, and compared to progressive campaigns that are sometimes (unfairly) sneered at as hobbies for white middle-class hippie children, it was a model for inclusive activism. This campaign has taken a politically toxic issue (‘immigrant’ is practically a swearword, and try adding ‘illegal’ in there), and made it about practical policies and economic good sense as much as morals or human rights. We can’t just be righteous, sometimes you have to address sceptics on their own terms (normally: how many pounds and/or votes is this going to cost or gain us?) and then you start to find allies in different places: businesses, religious leaders, Conservatives; Boris Johnson is now the campaign’s highest-profile supporter! All the while never forgetting that the initiative comes from the grassroots: there are Citizen chapters all over the UK, taking no government funds but being run by their members. They are in the local community and they are run by the community, and that’s why Trafalgar Square was heaving with thousands of people from every continent and every generation, an inspiring model for the participation of true citizens

Words: Sho Konno. Ctrl.Alt.Shift foot soldier.
Photos: Dwain Lucktung.