More heat than light among Obama protesters at Del Sol

Bent to his task, the Latino man pushed a shopping cart loaded with cases of bottled water up Patrick Lane late Friday morning toward the boisterous crowd that gathered outside Del Sol High School.

With his worn cap and blue jeans, he resembled one of the immigrants in the country illegally who wait for work every morning outside hardware stores and nurseries. If he spoke English, he declined to admit as much.

He carefully edged the cart into the crowd and was enveloped by the wall of noise that erupted as the motorcade that carried President Barack Obama approached the high school. Obama was there to rally support for his executive decision to protect up to 5 million immigrants in the country illegally from deportation if they meet several criteria.

The sidewalk bustled with boisterous and at times deafening First Amendment exercise on both sides of the debate. Of course, most of those assembled hadn’t actually come to debate the complex issues and history of immigration in the United States, but to express either their outrage or their elation at the president’s decision to bypass a dysfunctional Congress and compel reform through executive order.

“Obama! Worst president ever!” a man shouted into a megaphone over and over again.

“Undocumented, unafraid!” others roared.

“Impeach Obama!”

“Immigration now!”

Although there were plenty of locals among the protesters, the crowd was swollen with demonstrators on each side of the debate from California, Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. Some bragged that they’d been part of the tea party team that assembled to turn away buses of immigrant children at Murrieta, Calif., earlier this year. Others wore T-shirts identifying themselves as DREAM Act supporters. Still others identified themselves with the anti-immigration Oathkeepers group.

A few, like the man pushing the shopping cart, were walking illegal immigration stereotypes.

There were other stereotypes, too. With his red-white-and-blue shirt, there was no mistaking Robert Newman’s patriotism. The white-haired man from Riverside, Calif., said he felt compelled to drive to Las Vegas to wave his yellow “Stop Illegal Immigration” placard because the president has it all wrong. From “Fast and Furious” to Benghazi, and especially on immigration, Obama is clearly not his man.

“Our president is approaching amnesty by going around the Legislature,” Newman said. “It needs to be approved at the level closest to the people. ... We the people need to stand up. I’m here because I’m a patriot, and I love America, and I don’t think having open borders is good for America.”

And he should know. He said he was associated for many years with agriculture around Riverside County and hired many farmworkers from Mexico.

He benefited greatly from their labor, but he now believes the border policy is too lax, and the illegal immigration has gone too far. He favors allowing immigrant workers on farms but is against allowing them to “moonlight” as construction workers.

And if other presidents from both parties made executive decisions on immigration, he admitted, that doesn’t excuse this one. Like many people on the sidewalk Friday, Newman was comfortable with his position and wasn’t much interested in another viewpoint. He just doesn’t like Obama, and he was not alone.

Although for the most part the crowd self-segregated into like-minded groups, there were plenty of lively shouting matches. (It’s hard to call them “discussions” at that decibel level.)

And if someone argued that the Obama administration actually has deported more immigrants in the country illegally than the previous administration, they didn’t buy the numbers. And when someone countered that the total number of such immigrants actually has declined since the recession, they didn’t believe it.

Instead, they shout a little louder about a menace that threatens the nation’s economy and security. They see the rising brown wave from south of the border as representing much of what’s wrong with the direction the country is going.

“You should be protesting in your own country,” a woman from Southern California shouted to a pro-immigration group.

“Do you know my name?” one replied. “Do you know me? This is my country. That is what I’m doing here.”

“Obama should be helping American citizens,” she shouted into the din. “He should be helping the homeless. We have veterans living under bridges. I say this is the United States of America and he should be helping American citizens. We need a revolution in this country.”

“This is our home country,” came the answer.

It took time, but I eventually found two people trying to calmly discuss the issue.

“You have a right to express your voice,” one pro-immigration protester said to a gathering of Constitution-waving Oathkeepers. “I have a right to express my voice. We all know our immigration system is broken.”

“No it’s not,” a man said. “The laws aren’t enforced.”

That’s about as far as it went Friday outside Del Sol High School.

Shortly after 2 p.m., students began to leave campus. Hundreds filed past the overheated protesters on the opposite sidewalk.

Many of the students were brown-skinned. Del Sol’s student body is 67 percent Latino, and a substantial number of those has at least one parent who entered the United States illegally.

Brown and white and black and yellow: Members of the new Las Vegas filed past the noisy protesters and moved on with their day. If anyone on the sidewalk cared to notice, it’s obvious the immigration issue is all over but the shouting.

As the protest finally began to disperse, the man pushing the shopping cart emerged from the thinning crowd. Most of his water bottles had been distributed.

It looked like he’d had a good day.

John L. Smith’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Email him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call 702-383-0295. Follow him on Twitter @jlnevadasmith.