In a sea of Hispanic faces at this rally in New York City, there is blond-haired Anna Cwiecek of Holland.

"I wanted to live here," she told me. The 21-year-old with a pierced eyebrow said she's been in New York ten months on a student visa studying english. She would like to stay to pursue a degree in international criminal justice.

More representative of the crowd are painters and construction and restaurant workers from Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. They barely speak English, but using my broken Spanish, I can understand as they tell me they took the day off from work because they want to become U.S. citizens.

The main immigrant rally at Union Square has attracted perhaps 6,000 people, not quite enough to fill the entire square. In many New York neighborhoods, the day without immigrants did not generate boycotts at all.

So it was business as usual in this, the nation's business capital, even here in Union Square, where the regularly scheduled farmer's market had plenty of room for customers.

Scott Crosby, an "all natural" muffin and turnover salesman told me, "Sales are good."