Posted on 07/17/2005 9:02:31 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
MORRISTOWN, Tenn. - A volunteer movement that vows to guard America from a wave of illegal immigration has spread from the dusty U.S.-Mexican border to the verdant hollows of Appalachia.
At least 40 anti-immigration groups have popped up nationally, inspired by the Minuteman Project that rallied hundreds this year to patrol the Mexican border in Arizona.
"It's like O'Leary's cow has kicked over the lantern.
The fire has just started now," said Carl "Two Feathers" Whitaker, an American Indian activist and perennial gubernatorial candidate who runs the Tennessee Volunteer Minutemen, aimed at exposing those who employ illegals.
Critics call the movement vigilantism, and some hear in the words of the Minutemen a vitriol similar to what hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan used against Southern blacks in the 1960s.
The Minuteman Project has generated chapters in 18 states — from California to states far from Mexico, like Utah, Minnesota and Maine. The Tennessee group and others like it have no direct affiliation, but share a common goal.
"I struck the mother lode of patriotism or nationalism or whatever you want to call it," said Jim Gilchrist, a Vietnam veteran and retired CPA who co-founded the Minuteman Project 10 months ago. "That common nerve that was bothering a lot of people, but due to politically correct paralysis ... everyone was afraid to bring up — the lack of law enforcement."
At the Department of Homeland Security, whose authority includes patrolling borders and enforcing immigration laws, response to Minuteman-type activism is guarded.
"Homeland security is a shared responsibility, and the department believes the American public plays a critical role in helping to defend the homeland," agency spokesman Jarrod Agen said from Washington. "But as far doing an investigation or anything beyond giving us a heads-up, that should be handled by trained law enforcement."
A group leading patrols of the California border raised concerns from the U.S. Border Patrol last week when they urged volunteers to bring baseball bats, mace, pepper spray and machetes to patrol the border. They backed off the recommendation, but insisted on another weapon when they started patrols Saturday: guns.
"The guns are for one reason — to keep my people alive," said Jim Chase, a former Arizona Minuteman volunteer who is leading the effort.
Gilchrist said people from across the country have been sending him dirt on companies that hire illegal immigrants.
"It is a rampant problem. It is happening in Chicago and Portland, Maine. And Milwaukee and Montana and Idaho. And these people want the government to do something," he said.
The Southeast has the nation's fastest-growing Hispanic population. In Tennessee, the Hispanic population nearly tripled in the last decade.
The Tennessee Minutemen, which plans rallies in Memphis and Nashville and reputedly has heard from at least 120 potential members statewide, insist they are not vigilantes or racists.
"We don't want to project it as a hate group. We don't hate anybody or anything. But there are legal immigrants and illegal," Whitaker said.
In Morristown, a Southern industrial town of 25,000 with a small but burgeoning population of Latinos, some see the Volunteer Minutemen's spiel as race baiting.
"The same sort of dogmatism that racists used against blacks in lower Alabama and across the South, I am seeing the same patterns here," said Thom Robinson, who heads the area's Chamber of Commerce. "They are using it as a racially divisive thing."
Santos Aguilar, executive director with Alianza del Pueblo, a regional Hispanic support group in Knoxville, said he fears the volunteers are "spreading a lot of misinformation and are terrorizing the ethnic community in the area."
Members of the Hamblen County Commission recently suggested that Hispanic immigrants were to blame if property taxes have to be raised next year — though commissioners insisted they were talking only about illegal immigrants.
County Commissioner Tom Lowe, who says "we do not want (all) Hispanics stereotyped as illegal," estimates as many as 85 percent of Hamblen's Hispanics are — and he fears they carry drug-resistant disease.
"We could be two or three aliens away from an epidemic that would sweep through our county and state," the retired pharmacist said.
Hamblen County Mayor David Purkey said, like Lowe, he supports immigration laws, but finds such comments disturbing. "I think you have to be careful when you are expressing your opinion on that, that you don't appear as if you are against diversity as a whole," he said.
Guatemala native Noel Montepeque, who owns a company that provides a variety of blue-collar jobs to Hispanics, said the tone has changed since the first migrant farm workers passed through the area in the 1990s.
"Now they are getting afraid of the many Hispanic folks coming in," Montepeque said. "And we are coming to stay."
___
On the Net:
U.S. Customs and Border Protection: http://www.cbp.gov/
Tennessee Minutemen: http://www.tennesseevolunteerminutemen.com/
Government control of prices is antithetical to freedom. No matter who it applies to.
Notice the sleight of hand?
Anti-illegal becomes anti-immigrant.
Again, an insult, but no argument. Are you for or against current immigration policy? Is the current two-tiered labor force the right answer for America? Should labor and immigration issues be decided fait accompli, without debate or discussion?
Can there be a debate if one side of the discussion is demonized as racist, and the other side offers no argument?
Of course. But it is also hypocritical to vote in laws that do not apply to a significant portion of your work force. Its dishonest to vote in laws for the protection of laborers and then not apply them.
Are you in favor of open borders? Then say so.
Do you think that many Freepers are anti immigrant or not?
Anyone in their right mind is anti illegal. It's a slam dunk, why even discuss it on a "conservative" website?
Meanwhile, Government control of prices is antithetical to freedom. No matter who it applies to.
Then we are in agreement on minimum wage laws. And open borders.
I'll alert the media.
There is something I think you are alluding to, and seeing as I am feeling foolhardy, I'm going to go there.
People are noticing that the culture of the US is undergoing radical change, there seem to be huge numbers of immigrants entering the country at a rate far higher than anyone remembers, and in fact their observation is correct.
Whereas immigrants once numbered in the low hundreds of thousands per year, now legal and illegals combined add up to well over a million a year, and the effect is noticeable.
People see that there is no effort to control the border, and they are reacting.
But there is another issue.
Despite the addition of over a million people each year, we still have the lowest unemployment rate in the world. This means we are absorbing these people. This means that there is a place for them.
Part of that certainly is owing to our economy, which relative to the world economy is fairly dynamic. But there is something else going on.
We were told as long as I can remember that the world was overpopulated, and as a part of that argument abortion was introduced. We abort about a million a year, and we admit legally and illegally about a million a year.
As I sometimes say rather irreverently, Democrats are committing suicide and replacing themselves with Mexicans, which I consider to be a good bargain. But in more seriousness, what is happening is that people who don't believe in life are destroying their young, and their young are being replaced by people who do believe in life.
The same thing is happening in Europe, where birth rates have fallen below the replacement rate. They are dying away and replacing themselves with Algerians.
In our case, half of the country does believe in life, and is raising up another generation. The other half does not, and so the house next door that their children would have occupied, has a family of Mexicans living in it. Culturally western, culturally christian. Family oriented. By comparison to our European cousins, we are blessed.
If you wipe out a million births per year, you are guaranteeing that your culture is going to change as people arrive to replace the people who were never born.
So, no, I am not one of those who believes that Mexicans are destroying this country, far from it. They are good people by and large, and they are filling a gap that we ourselves have created... or rather, that the death cult has created.
But if the economy requires them, then their entry should be legalized. I don't want to read about another truckload of dead immigrants abandoned in the desert. And, pardon me if I get annoyed at boatloads of immigrants from outside this hemisphere using the same un-patrolled routes to cross into the country.
Do you support the FTAA?
You either: (1) obviously don't live in a border state, or (2) live in a border state, but in some kind of cloistered area well away from the barbarian invasion. Ask anyone in southern California, say Santa Ana, whether your utopian description of "the family next door" bears any resemblance to their own experience.
"People are noticing that the culture of the US is undergoing radical change, there seem to be huge numbers of immigrants entering the country at a rate far higher than anyone remembers,..."
And precisely the problem. Such numbers preclude any meaningful assimilation, and do nothing to prevent the headlong rush to grab every freebie available in America to which they are certainly not entitled.
I believe in strongly defending American sovereignty and in the preservation of American culture, customs, traditions and language. These are the values of loyal American conservatives. They are not the values of FR's pro-illegal alien contingent.
Which is why I have no use for them. None.
I'm uneasy about it. I'm in favor of freeing up investment to the degree that makes sense. If businesses are going offshore, I would rather they remained in this hemisphere.
I'm not in favor of allowing the free flow of immigrant workers, which seems to be the direction some of these agreements are heading.
I have seen that at one time the movement was to send factories to Mexico, which I wasn't happy about, but I accepted it as preferable to Mexican workers coming here. But since then I have seen the move shift to China. I have even seen American companies in Mexico uproot and move to China.
There are good reasons for this, the lack of personal security in Mexico being a big one. And the fact that trucks moving in Mexico are regularly hijacked. Mexico is one of the worse countries in the world for kidnapping of execs and their families. Who needs it.
I want to improve trade in this hemisphere but I don't want to import Mexico's security problems. Recent stories about the Zetas moving back and forth across the border worry me.
I don't suppose I've answered your question, I've been involved in projects in Mexico and points further south, and I have a love for those countries. But we don't want their problems.
So I suppose what I favor is free trade to the degree that is practical, but secure borders. The Patriots have shown that its entirely possible to secure the borders, and thats where I want to start.
Once illegal immigration has been cut off, if we find as I suspect that we have labor shortages, then enact procedures to bring in the workers we need, legally. But this free-for-all on the border has to end.
We share worry, it appears. :)
Globalism may seem inevitable but that doesn't mean it is the right thing either, no matter how it is sold or who is selling it.
I agree with you on the border issue as well.
Thanks!
Don't misunderstand me. I do live in a border state, and I do know both legal and illegal immigrants. I've worked and lived in Mexico and points further south.
If you've read my other posts, you'll know that I favor securing the border. I'm tired of the open sieve that is our border. The patriots have shown that it can be done, really we all know it can be done. I want to put an end to the free-for-all on the border. Mexico doesn't open her border to endless immigration from further south, and we shouldn't either.
My remarks about the culture, though, were based on another issue. Europe is dying, because they no longer believe in life, they are no longer reproducing themselves, and they are replacing themselves with muslims who hate what they stand for.
Compared to that, we are fortunate.
But if you take away a million births a year, that aren't being born, and replace them with a million foreigners, you are going to see a cultural shift. The cultural shift is real. You evidently don't like it, and you shouldn't.
But while the open border is a big part of the problem, the million missing Americans is the other part of the problem. That is a direct result of the death cult. If you are an FR conservative, you aren't part of the problem. You no doubt believe in life, and have or will raise a family with the same values.
Our friends across the aisle, however, do not believe in life, and they are destroying their young. And they are being replaced by foreigners.
So its a two part problem. Secure the borders. And help America to regain its confidence in the principles that it was founded on. A culturally confident country is a country that will reproduce itself, not merely its DNA, but its spiritual DNA, which are its principles.
But I shouldn't speak for him, he'll be here soon enough with the same old BS. Think of him like one of those "whack the mole" games in the penny arcade. He's not important enough to get angry over.
Rod and the handful of unlimited illegal immigration supporters get great pleasure out of inflaming unknowing posters here. Those of us that confront them and even try to get them to provide an intelligent response ususaaly get no answer at all. Facts, figures and common sense means nothing to these few posters. They simply address the posters that haven't yet figured out that their sole purpose of posting here is to piss people off.
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