Save Our Face – SOS, Fascistic Immigration Laws + the “Thrill” of Defeat

As the Senate prepares to debate a bill that would make millions of migrant workers without papers instant felons - and which would lay the groundwork for mass roundups, Nazi style detention centers at the border and mass deportations - the anti-Mexican organization Save Our State and other minutemen pulled out every stop to gain a victory at a day labor center in Burbank today.

These people want a walled off country. They want migrants hunted down, rounded up by La Migra and the National Guard in a wholesale war in the streets, and penned in concentration camps. They want cruel laws passed that will make all Brown people suspects in a hostile nation. Theirs is a movement for an ethnic cleansing of the “third world cesspool” they call “Mexifornia.”

On Saturday, minutemen came to Burbank from everywhere in Southern California, even from other states, in order to save face following a humiliating defeat across the country in their “National Day of Protest” against Mexicans 2 weeks ago. In a nationwide effort the minutemen forces managed to pull together only 700 people for those demonstrations - and were outnumbered 10 to 1 wherever they turned.

Today in Burbank, they managed to import 65 people (a little less than 10% of their national potential) and found themselves out -numbered yet again, with 100 counter protestors surrounding them.

They claimed it a “victory.”

Normally, SOS can draw no more than 15 of their hardcore white racist membership to any event. Last week, after SOS leaders called for a demo in the same location, no one turned out at all.

The minutemen forces seem thrilled with a recent spate of media coverage – no matter how bad it makes them look. One SOS leader, Joe Turner, whined at another member online for missing the demo, saying, “Its okay. You are the one that is going to miss being on FoxNews (cable) and all the other news outlets that will be there.” The media were there today en masse.

Burbank Police were also out in force, with their attention turned in one direction only – against the counter-protestors. SOS praised the police presence as “professional.” Minutemen freely crossed the street and came among the counter-protestors to harass them with cameras, but no counter-protestor could so much as step off the sidewalk without a threat or a hand in the back from the police.

The main source of SOS's absurd claims to victory – besides being less outnumbered than usual, was the $300 bullhorn one of them brought that drowned out four of the counter-protestor’s bullhorns with sheer decibels. That equation changed when Danza Cuahtemoc arrived with a pair of drums that split the air like thunder.

Make no mistake.

A storm is coming, and today’s demonstration was the calm before it hits. Both sides, the neo-Klan and the anti-racists, know just how high the stakes have risen as the Senate considers competing bills, one of which will make migrant workers felons, subject them to potential mass roundups, and deeply stigmatize all Brown people as criminals on sight.

One out of seven workers in the US is a migrant. With or without papers, every one of them will become a suspected felon and target for official and unofficial racist harassment.

The bill would also set reactionary and racist towns loose to use the police to enforce immigration laws, turning them into a new breed of Texas Rangers and Night Riders hunting down immigrants at all hours of the day and night. It would also create five double-layer border fences, 698 miles in all, along the Mexico – US border in California and Arizona.

It would become a crime to assist the undocumented. Doctors, teachers, lawyers, and those who leave water in the desert for border crossers (who die in the hundreds each year) would face prison and the confiscation of their property.

Another bill will create a guest worker program and legalize some migrants, an outcome the minutemen view as disastrous.

Even this bill, backed by “President” Bush but loathed by the minutemen as not stringent enough, would create a permanent sub-underclass in the US, with workers imported for six short years, then booted out, much like the Apartheid system of South Africa.

The next major action by pro-migrant forces will come on February 3rd, when the Border Angels come to LA on the first leg of an across-the-nation-caravan to draw attention to the 4,000 migrants who’ve died at the border in recent years, and to stop the most vicious elements of the neo-fascist attacks on immigrants coming out of Washington DC.

The minutemen and allied forces like SOS are shock troops and storm troopers in a deadly serious war.

It’s a war the Mexican People and their allies must win.