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TikTok was boosted during the coronavirus pandemic.
Many young people, and not so young, began to make the social network of Chinese origin fashionable, which accompanied them in times of quarantine or confinement.
The challenges, dances, pranks, jokes, lip syncs, and other clips went viral, with millions of people joining the app.
However, TikTok is also used to share ideas and call social movements, like last February 14.
A tiktoker named Carlos Eduardo Espina, organized through the social network the movement “A day without immigrants”, which sought to protest in different cities to call on President Joe Biden to pressure Congress to approve immigration reform.
There were more than 20 regions where marches were held to request the new law in the United States.
However, although in some places thousands of people gathered, in others only a few dozen were counted.
In Washington, DC, regarding a thousand immigrants, most of them young, gathered outside the White House, shouting at the president to keep his campaign promises.
It is worth remembering that Biden assured in his presidential career that he was going to give more dignified and humane treatment to minorities, including immigrants and dreamers.
The truth is that the legalization of millions of undocumented immigrants remains stalled in the Senate, where Elizabeth MacDonough has rejected three projects that would give the papers to regarding 6.5 million people. The lawyer maintains that she would overload the budget by regarding 130 billion dollars in the next 10 years.
What was striking regarding the Valentine’s Day protests was that they were not organized by traditional movements, such as the Coalition for Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN), UnidosUS, Casa de Maryland or the Coalition for the Full Rights of Immigrants.
Instead, it was made by a 23-year-old tiktoker, a couple of weeks ago, which reached two million people.
“I saw that the issue of immigration reform was dying and I thought we needed to revive it. And it occurred to me that on February 14, one of the days with the highest sales of gifts and consumption, immigrants would stay at home so that the United States would notice their absences,” said Carlos Eduardo Espina, who organized the day on the social network .
At first, the tiktoker believed that the day would be successful, not only in Washington, where his messages were reposted, but in the rest of the country such as Los Angeles, New York, Houston, Miami and Chicago, among others.
“I thought that the support was there, that people were willing to stop businesses, leave their children at home, take to the streets, but looking at it, in DC there were regarding three (according to their calculations), but in other parts of the country it was a few hundred or dozens,” he said.
However, Espina said that it is a preparation for the next step: the Day without Immigrants on May 1. “It will be easier, because it falls on a Sunday.”
“This time there was a lot of publicity in the media. We hope that in the immediate future there will be a debate in Congress and a vote for the reform. Meanwhile, we have to keep working,” he said.
