Thread: Anti-immigration caravan makes it to Washington

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Anti-immigration caravan makes it to Washington
Minuteman Project holds rally as Senate ready to debate bill
Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau

Saturday, May 13, 2006


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Washington -- The Minutemen arrived at the Capitol from Los Angeles on a sunny day Friday, warning of an invasion of illegal immigrants and treason by President Bush, whose aides announced he would address the nation on immigration Monday night from the Oval Office.

Bush is expected to push for a major immigration bill that is set for Senate debate beginning Monday while assuring Americans the government is focusing on tough border enforcement. The Senate bill, among its highlights, would provide a path toward citizenship for the nation's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, create a guest worker program for several hundred thousand low- and high-skilled workers each year, and improve border control.

"When we are no longer a nation governed under the rule of law ... that means we're a nation governed by mob rule," shouted Jim Gilchrist, leader of the Minuteman Project, a group volunteering to guard the border with Mexico, whose members began a caravan from California more than a week ago.

The Senate legislation returns for a two-week debate more than a month after it collapsed in partisan acrimony amid the conflicting currents of a Latino awakening and a powerful conservative backlash. Both political parties feel compelled to take action to pacify voters and interests groups riled about immigration -- for and against.

But among Republicans the divide is particularly poisonous, pitting conservatives angered by large numbers of illegal immigrants entering the country each year and others who believe capturing the Latino vote is vital to maintaining the GOP's hold on the red-state West -- and the White House.

The House passed a harsh border-crackdown bill in December that has enraged many Latinos and triggered a series of marches and protests. It would make illegal immigrants felons and build a high steel fence on 700 miles of the Mexican border.

The Senate bill is its counterpoint, backed by Bush, most Democrats and a minority of Republicans, including Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

In the midst of the debate, a group of perhaps 100 Minutemen and their supporters arrived in a park near the Senate to protest against illegal immigration. But they were nearly outnumbered by the media, including a large contingent of Spanish-language television reporters bent on interviewing a second-generation Mexican American Minuteman, Raymond Herrera of Victorville (San Bernardino County), who spoke fluent Spanish and claimed that 40 million Latinos would soon have children and become 160 million, and bring their parents and number 200 million, a sentiment that appeared widely shared by his colleagues.

"I'm an American," Herrera said, allowing that his grandparents were born in Mexico.

The Senate is about to "sell our sovereignty ... in exchange for cheap labor," said Barbara Coe, president of California Coalition for Immigration Reform and a co-author of California's 1994 Proposition 187, which would have denied public services to illegal immigrants.

When the Minutemen began singing "The Star-Spangled Banner," noting they were doing so in English, a small collection of left-wing pro-immigration groups, including ANSWER and the International Socialist Organization, shouted "Fascista, Fascista" from across a wide police barricade.

The various Minuteman speakers warned that a foreign country is invading and occupying the United States without firing a shot, and called for the immediate deportation of all illegal immigrants.

Taunting the counterprotesters, Gilchrist embraced a dreadlocked Ted Hughes, a Los Angeles homeless activist who said Gilchrist's cause "is our cause."

"They're protecting our freedoms in America from illegal people, foreign invaders out to destroy black people," Hughes said. "They are crossing our border illegally in the name of our civil rights that we fought for, that was born out of our slavery in this country. They're taking our homes, our hospitals, our schools. They are literally calling us racists."

Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., whose Tucson district has the highest number of illegal crossings of any place in the country -- over half a million apprehensions last year -- said the chaos at the border is real enough.

"The issues are from something as simple but important as physical environmental degradation, people abandoning their shirts and coats and water jugs, the plastic and paper strewn over the desert, causing environmental damage, to the most serious, people losing their lives, dying in the heat of the desert, especially with the summer starting. And then there's everything in between, from vandalism to auto thefts to the consternation and fear of people streaming through yards at night and cutting up fences."

Kolbe is a chief sponsor of legislation that the Senate bill is largely modeled on but that was not allowed a vote in the House. He said he faces tremendous local opposition to his approach of offering a path to legalization for those already in the country illegally.

"But I know it's right," Kolbe said. "I know you can talk about just enforcement, but it won't work" unless it is coupled with some kind of path to legal residence and expanded legal entry.

The Senate logjam was broken earlier this week when Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada reached agreement on allowing amendments to the Senate bill, and appointing members to the critical conference committee with the House, which will attempt to reconcile the two chambers' widely divergent approaches.

The Senate vote on passage is expected before Memorial Day.

Reid won an unprecedented concession from Frist to appoint 12 Democrats to the unusually large 26-senator conference committee, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts.

House leaders have insisted they will never accept anything that smacks of amnesty, as they contend the Senate bill does.

E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead@sfchronicle.com.

notice the headline "anti-immigration" ???? Once again that horrible hareful, racist word, "illegal" is left out.

Not that it will do any good, but I sent her an email telling her to consult a dictionary and look up immigrant and illegal alien before she writes any more articles about the Minutemen.