What kind of people are attracted to make citizen's arrests at the border?

[SemiCharmedQuark]

The rancher who has most often been accused of illegal citizen's arrests and human-rights violations, former deputy sheriff Roger Barnett, boasts of personally rounding up more than 2,000 migrants around his 22,000-acre ranch — in 2002 alone. After a 1999 incident in which he was accused of holding seven migrants at rifle-point, Barnett made his Haniganesque attitude abundantly clear.
"If them poor bastards felt threatened, sorry," Barnett told the Arizona Daily Star. "If they don't like it, they better stay home."

Since the contemporary outbreak of vigilantism, local, state and federal authorities appear to have mostly looked the other way. "Prosecutions?" asks newly elected Congressman Raul Grijalva, who represents a big slice of southern Arizona (see interview, Vigilante Watch). "There haven't even been investigations."

Grijalva believes that race is a big factor in the lack of prosecutions. So does Douglas Mayor Ray Borane, whose town council passed a resolution this fall condemning both vigilantism and U.S. border policy. Borane asks a rhetorical question: "If it were American citizens that had gotten detained and held at gunpoint and who knows what else for two or three hours, I wonder what would happen?"


"Since he ambled into Arizona, Spencer has tried gamely to separate himself from his controversial past. While his Web sites look identical, the anti-Mexican rhetoric has been watered down on Americanborderpatrol.com. But at the same time, Spencer's American Patrol site has called migrant-rights advocate Isabel Garcia a "Mexican government agent" and accused Congressman Grijalva of formerly belonging to an "anti-American seditionist organization." Garcia, the Web site claims, is "part of an advance fifth column" of the Reconquista."

The Minute Men aren't new. It's been going on for years. The only thing that has changed is the name.



http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?pid=51



Also, perhaps some should check the stats on how many illegals are here. Most Mexicans here are here legally.

[4morewars]

1. Uh-Oh

You better put on your flame proof suit !

[SemiCharmedQuark]

3. They should flame the SPL Center then.

Or the ACLU. Or the various Tolerance groups.

[Coastie for Truth]

2. The kind of people are attracted to make citizen's arrests at the border

are NOT the kind of people who man Mass Shelters and Mass Feeding Stations after disasters (even though they might think they are).

[LdyGuique]

4. Individual citizens are reacting because Bushco and Corporate

America has not only done nothing to stem the tide of illegal immigrants, the hiring of them, or supporting through federal funds the huge expenses being incurred by cities and states all over the country.

You thought the tsunami damage was huge with the deaths of over 150,000 and another similar number missing -- yet, illegal immigration is flowing over the Mexican border at the rate of 1 million people per year. The Mexican government is not only not attempting to stop them, but is actively supporting them.

Wake up and smell the roses -- how can any claim to national security be made with this leaking sieve of a border? It's not just Mexicans who come across, nor even just central Americans -- it's many nationalities being ferried across.

It's true that we need genuine immigration reform, including a worker visa program, such as the Bracero program of the 60s and 70s -- but even that program will not stem the tide.

The is an INTERNATIONAL border -- it's not a state-to-state border. These people are not coming over the border illegally to play the tourist. They are being hired by American companies of all sizes that displace American workers from their jobs due to wage exploitation.

Illegal Immigration Costs Texans $4.7 Billion a Year Finds New Study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)
Tuesday April 5, 4:23 pm ET

WASHINGTON, April 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Mass illegal immigration is costing Texas more than $4.65 billion a year finds a new report released today by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The Costs of Illegal Immigration to Texans, examines the fiscal costs being borne by the state to provide education, health care and incarceration for an illegal alien population now estimated to exceed 1.5 million.

Continued . . .

Article Published: Sunday, April 03, 2005
There's nothing cheap about immigrant labor
By Richard D. Lamm
Denver Post

It is easy to see why illegal immigrants are attractive to employers. These are generally good, hard-working people who will quietly accept minimum wage (or less), who don't generally get health or other benefits, and if they complain, they can be easily fired.

For some employers it is an abused form of labor. Even minimum wage is attractive to workers from countries whose standard of living is a fraction of ours.

But it is not "cheap labor." It may be cheap to those who pay the wages, but for the rest of us it is clearly subsidized labor, as we taxpayers pick up the costs of education, health and other municipal costs imposed by this workforce. That has become a substantial and growing cost as the nature of illegal immigration patterns has changed.

For decades, illegal immigrants were single men who would come up from Mexico or Central America alone, pick crops or perform other low-paying physical labor and then go home. They were indeed cheap labor. But starting in the 1960s, these workers either brought their families or smuggled them into the country later. They become a permanent or semi-permanent population living in the shadows but imposing immense municipal costs.

Illegal immigration today isn't cheap labor, except to the employer. To the rest of us it is subsidized labor, where a few get the benefit and the rest of us pay. These costs ought to be obvious to all, but the myths of cheap labor and "jobs Americans won't do" persist.

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~158~2792220,00.html">Continued . . .

[SemiCharmedQuark]

5. And your source is a radical right wing anti-immigration group?

Please. Provide a source that's legit. The first link isn't even an article, it's a fucking press release.