For "Thunder on the Border," click this picture:
Posted on 07/17/2005 12:05:52 PM PDT by Graybeard58
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, referring to the fabled start of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Whitaker, an American Indian activist and perennial gubernatorial candidate, 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."
Let me state my position on immigration loud, clear and unapologetically.
I want ALL illegal immigration shut down yesterday.
I want immigration, both laws and enforcement, investigated, reviewed, and redrawn. The whole thing's been an uncontrolled whore's nightmare since 1965 (ref the nineteen 9/11 killers).
Now, how about you and your ilk coming clean. I'm damned if I can understand where you coming from.
But I'll bet the farm your motives are not altruistic.
Check the $$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
For "Thunder on the Border," click this picture:
No matter how many times the word "immigrant" hate is inserted, it can never mask the stench of a rotting liberal Bushbot, globalist, neocon.
What's your source for that figure?
If you were serious about your horsesh!t diversity stance, and truly keeping up with the other PC, globalists you'd be posting in two languages.
Yup, when your hero LBJ shut down the bracero program.
MY fight/anger is not with the hungry wetback, but with the fatcat neocons(ie neocomms) and the libs that are complicit in the lawbreaking.
Think you for reminding me to add neocons to my lis of things the Antis oppose. By neocon I assume you mean anyone who doesn't worship Pat Buchanan?
You do know that the Bush proposal is not anything like the bracero program dont you? Unless the bracero program added tens and tens of millions of new permanent residents and citizens? No I didnt think it did.
Surely both you and Buchanan can agree that we all should oppose the neocon acceptance of the welfare state.
>"So your laziness to understand another must be codified into law?"
Förlåt, jag förstår inte frågan.
Don't be lazy now Cultuarl Jihad, go ahead and try to understand my question to you.
Perhaps you don't understand why Quebec has come very, very close to seceeding from Canada several times over the last twenty years??
There is an awakening to the the neocon-highjack that, thankfully, is going on as we speak.
The days for you're pitiful, cheap-shot coverups are numbered.
Uh no Bush's program is a guest worker program akin to the one LBJ got rid of.
You have posted 3 replies since I asked my question of you in my reply #105, 45 minutes ago.
Do you have a source? Or did you forget about my question? If so I will pose it again:
What is your source for stating that 25% of Marines are hispanic?
Typo in #116:
Should have read 20% not 25%
Your bracero shut down is totally separate from (and a year or two prior to) the immigration changes I alluded to.
I suspect you knew that, but like Bayourod and Cultural Jihad, you never make a cogent reply where a cheap hipshot, mistatement will do.
It's been an hour now since I posed the question to bayourod AGAIN. You have posted since I last asked you to provide documentation for your statement that 20% of Marines are hispanic.
Am I to conclude that you pulled that figure from who knows where? If not show us the link for your statement in post #83
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