What's wrong with the following analogy? The Massachusetts Minutemen of the American Revolutionary War is to the British Army as a volunteer vigilante group is to illegal immigrants who cross the Arizona-Mexico border.
If you believe the Minuteman Project Web site, stopping the influx of illegal immigrants coming in from Mexico is tantamount to fighting for independence from an oppressive monarchy. Last time I checked, the British aristocracy wasn't exactly sneaking across the pond to wash the colonialists' dishes or landscape their front yards.
For the month of April, the project plans to station concerned citizens along the border in Cochise County, near Tombstone, in order to "assist the U.S. Department of Homeland Security by observing and reporting illegal activity." The carrying of firearms is neither encouraged nor discouraged by the group, with a passing reference to the "free to carry" laws in Arizona. The Web site claims that more than 500 volunteers have already signed up.
The project's Web site also claims the effort is motivated by a desire to stop those who break the law, rather than racism. Don't believe that for a second. The Minuteman Project has been generating an incredible amount of interest among neo-Nazi and white supremacist Web sites on the Internet - so much so that the Southern Poverty Law Center, an anti-hate legal organization based in Alabama, is tracking the project.
What goes better with vigilante "justice" than Tombstone, Ariz.? Not much, because lawlessness virtually runs through the (silver) veins in this part of Cochise County. The romanticization of the wild west along with what Arizona Daily Star reporter Michael Marizco calls the "'sexy' topic of hundreds of people going into Cochise County... to do a job the federal government can't do" is fueling a great deal of national and international media interest in the Minuteman Project.
Both Marizco and Zoe Hammer-Tomizuka, a member of the activist group Border Action Network (BAN), view this attention negatively. "It allows the anti-immigrant movement to have undue influence in framing the national debate over immigration reform," said Hammer-Tomizuka. "It doesn't give equal voice to groups who are actually affected."
They definitely have a point. Before calling the BAN headquarters, all I wanted to write was a gory, racist detailing of the Minuteman Project. Basically, I was interested in how a bunch of closed-minded hacks were going to drag out the firearms and play at being cops during their southwest vacation.
But emphasizing that stuff is like the Fox News network approach to media: total sensationalism. The real issues affecting both immigrants and the populations that live along the border are those of immigration policy and necessary reforms.
According to BAN, those most affected by immigration policies in the United States are those residents who live in the border towns - Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who are subject to racial profiling in the course of daily activities such as going to the grocery store or driving to school.
Hammer-Tomizuka expressed what she sees as the giant contradiction in U.S. immigration policy: "There's a big political show of trying to stop immigration, (but) at the same time there is the tacit agreement that the worker should come across the border" for the sake of economic interests.
The objectives of groups like the Minuteman Project are fed and developed by the criminalization of immigration, as opposed to a meaningful plan that recognizes and addresses immigration.
Rui Wang is a third-year law student. She can be reached at letters@wildcat.arizona.edu.