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"Don Gabacho" <jpastore@nettaxi.com> wrote in message
news:1121740835.061290.240100@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
Anti-immigration groups find many volunteers
40 anti-illegal immigration groups exist nationally

Sunday, July 17, 2005; Posted: 9:19 p.m. EDT (01:19 GMT)


Carl Whitaker, an American Indian activist, runs the Tennessee
Volunteer Minutemen.RELATED
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Manage Alerts | What Is This? MORRISTOWN, Tennessee (AP) -- A volunteer
movement that vows to guard the United States 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. "[The] 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."