Posted on 07/18/2005 12:35:36 PM PDT by SandRat
Groups organize in 18 states to oppose illegal immigration
MORRISTOWN, Tenn. - A volunteer movement that vows to guard America from a wave of illegal immigration has spread from the 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 people in the country illegally.
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 as 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 it urged volunteers to bring baseball bats, Mace, pepper spray and machetes to patrol the border. The group backed off the recommendation but insisted on another weapon when members 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, who plan rallies in Memphis and Nashville and reputedly have heard from 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 of 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 farmworkers 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."
Interesting story
How arrogant.
It's not all about hispanic people either. It wasn't so long ago we had a Canadian come in carrying a bloody chainsaw Not to mention the would be LAX bomber. Those two came here legally by way of legit crossings.
I'm most concerned about what crosses by way of the woods, rivers and lakes.
So true, so true.
Look for a member of a barely-fictionalized Minuteman group to be a defendant in a "topical plotline" for a murder-crime show.
Yep wonder if anyone even remembers the Puple Gang anymore.
My great grandfather was friends with some purple gang members. His place in Jackson was a good place to spend the night between Detroit and Chicago. That side of the family were all outlaws back in those days.
Long live the Minutemen who are trying to do for America what our "leaders" refuse to do.
WHY are they using the word "migrant" when they mean "illegal alien"? My 5th generation parents were "migrant" laborers at one time in their lives, and they were not illegals.
Americans from Oklahoma during the whole "Grapes of Wrath" era were "migrants" and they weren't illegal.
"The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,
1. The act of invading; the act of encroaching upon the rights or possessions of another; encroachment; trespass.
>>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.<<
Only politicians need to be concerned with "don't appear as if you are against diversity as a whole,". The rest of us aren't running for re-election.
You have to pronounce that correctly. It's d-i-v-r-s-i-t-y.
This is how political parties/movements get started.
Isn't that sorta how Texas got started?
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