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                        Undocumented Migrants Gone Wild

     “A right-wing militia patrolling the Mexican border to catch
illegal immigrants is pitting some residents in favor of old-style
frontier justice against critics who say the militiamen are the
real threat.” --- Opening line from a Reuters article written by
Tim Gaynor about the Minuteman Project, an all-volunteer
effort being conducted in Arizona by a group of citizens to call
attention to the problem of the porous border between the U.S.
and Mexico.


     Such colorful journalistic phrasings as the ones above can
be great for reeling in readers tantalized by the prospect of a
chaotic and violent skirmish between militant rightists, illegal
aliens and the U.S. Border Patrol.  In reality, however, what the
Minuteman Project is engaging in is more akin to a
neighborhood watch than a lawless spree of vigilantism, so
readers looking for journalistic accuracy ought to look
elsewhere.
     You have to wonder if Tim Gaynor either slept through or
totally missed the first day of Newswriting 101, which must
have included at least some little tidbit about not writing
biased and misleading lines.  Giving Tim‘s work just a cursory
going over, one notices factual inaccuracies popping up like
mushrooms in cow dung.
     For instance, consider the very first words:  “A right-wing
militia . . .”  The obvious question for Tim is, what makes the
Minutemen either “right-wing” or “militia?”  “Right-wing”
smacks of negativity and infers an extreme degree of
conservativeness, but by whose standards is it overly
conservative to want to see the simple enforcement of our
country’s immigration laws?
     As for “militia,” granted the Minutemen took their name
from a very famous one, but they are still not one themselves.  A
militia is basically defined as an organized group of citizen
soldiers, but these Minutemen have no soldierly or military
objectives at all.
     Skipping along a few words we come to “old-style frontier
justice,” which suggests to readers that the “right-wing militia”
is looking for some kind of violent showdown with illegals.  In
reality, the Minutemen have specifically stated that they will
neither confront nor apprehend anyone themselves, but
instead only report lawbreakers to the proper authorities.  The
same can be said about a reference to “vigilantes” further on in
the article.
     So, are you beginning to see a pattern?  We’ve just dissected
basically one sentence from one article on a politically
sensitive issue and it absolutely reeks of misinformation and
bias.  And you can bet your sweet bippy this wasn’t just an
aberration that fell through the cracks of an otherwise well-
oiled journalistic machine that efficiently weeds out bad
information.
     Interestingly, the journalism problem and the border
problem both have similar underlying causes.  The reason the
border problem is allowed to ceaselessly rage out of control--
and the reason that people who want that to change are
branded by the media as right-wing, racist, militia extremists--
is because of the politically correct thinking that rages out of
control at all levels of society, even, unfortunately, all the way
up to the highest office in the land.
     That thinking says that if we crack down on the southern  
border, it might be offensive to members of what is a nonwhite
ethnic group and that wouldn’t be kosher no matter how many
millions of them blatantly violate our laws and sovereignty.
     The Minuteman Project would like to shatter that imbecilic
paradigm into tiny irretrievable pieces before illegal crossings
become so numerous and crowded that bin Laden himself
could waltz across the border unnoticed amongst the
multitudes.  As sensible as that should sound to any rational
person, it will be fought every step of the way by the ACLU, the
U.S. Border Patrol, hordes of American politicians, el
presidente de Mexico and myriad others.
     First, the ACLU, America’s most infuriating gaggle of
lawyers, is looking for any excuse to slap a lawsuit on the
Minutemen, warning that they might come to Arizona “as
vigilantes and end up leaving as defendants.”  Of course, illegal
aliens can flood into Arizona until doomsday and never be
looked upon as “defendants” by the ACLU, but rather as
innocent economic migrants just looking for honest work.
     ACLU of Arizona spokesman Ray Ybarra went so far as to say
that the very presence of the Minutemen at the border
constitutes “unlawful imprisonment” of “undocumented
migrants.”  Huh?  Strait-jacketed bedlamites in rubber rooms
routinely make more sensible statements.
     The U.S. Border Patrol has its own complaints, among them
that the Minutemen have inadvertently set off devices placed in
the desert that are designed to detect illegals.  Well, sure, there’
s a big problem.  The normally stellar performance of the
Border Patrol is being loused up by a bunch of klutzy,
interfering vigilantes setting off false alarms in a system that is
otherwise so efficient that only a million or two illegals cross
the border every year unimpeded.
     American politicians are scared witless of offending
Hispanic voters and Presidente Fox isn’t about to do anything
to stem the flow of illegals from his own country to the U.S.
since they provide the single biggest source of money for his
basket case of a country.
     Aligned with everyone else against the Minuteman Project is
a vicious Central American gang known as MS-13, which has
reportedly made threats against the Minutemen for daring to
bring attention to the border problem (and possibly messing up
their smuggling operations).  A perfect illustration of the
problem is the leader of the gang who has been arrested eight
times since 2001, deported on numerous occasions, but keeps
coming back as if, instead of having to cross sovereign national
borders with some sort of legal restrictions, he’s traveling from
Peoria on a frolicsome motoring trip to the Wisconsin Dells.
     Make no mistake.  There’s bedlam down on the border and
for various perverse reasons, nobody in authority wants to do
anything about it.  The Minuteman Project, despite the
grotesque inaccuracies and caricatures in the media, stands
some sliver of a chance of inspiring change.  If something  
doesn’t change, however, someday we’ll be looking back on
2005 as the good ol’ days before things really got out of hand.