When the late Alabama Governor George Wallace - surrounded by armed guards - stood on the steps of the University of Alabama to prevent a young Black woman from entering the University of Alabama, he declared, "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”

He also inspired a man who would later stand at the US / Mexican border, armed to the teeth, to prevent other brown skinned people from entering someplace he didn’t want to them to enter - the United States.

A year ago Jim Gilchrist brought the mainstream media to a frenzy as they reported on his Minuteman Project, a group of racist vigilantes who’d traveled to the border – guns in hand – to stop the immigrant “invasion” and the “re-conquest,” they said, of the US Southwest by Mexicans.

Later, Gilchrist ran for the US House of Representatives as a member of American Independent Party – the party founded by Wallace, the arch-segregationist.

Like Wallace with the Dixiecrats of his day, Gilchrist has plenty of allies in Congress – chief among them Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo, best known for advocating that the US “take out” the Muslim holy city of Mecca with a nuclear weapon.

Tancredo is also known as the head of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, where, chillingly, he leads 91 members of Congress.

Tancredo and his crew don’t like migrants - when the Denver Post profiled an undocumented high school student with a 3.9 GPA, the Congressman tried to have the boy deported.

Tancredo’s Caucus is also credited with pushing through Congress the passage of the now-notorious Sensenbrenner immigration bill – the one that, if approved by the Senate, would make all people in the US who lack papers into instant felons, a criminalized, stigmatized and profoundly vulnerable under-caste.

The Congressman is consistent. After taking out Mecca, it would seem, Tancredo holds that undocumented immigrants "need to be found before it is too late. They're coming here to kill you, and you, and me, and my grandchildren."

The Minutemen love Rep. Tancredo, and they do not leave the man to suffer alone in his profound paranoia.

Minutemen co-leader Chris Simcox would have us believe that "…we need the National Guard to clean out all our cities and round them [migrants] up. They are hard-core criminals. They have no problem slitting your throat and taking your money or selling drugs to your kids or raping your daughters and they are evil people."

The temptation, of course, is to dismiss these people as mere crackpots. The problem with that analysis however, is clear. These people have power. They’ve dominated and defined the debate on immigration for the past year – at least until this past weekend, when well over a million – even two million people - marched in opposition to their xenophobic and persecutorial dementia.

Southern California activists have seen that racist dementia up close, time and again, as we confronted the Minutemen and their allies in an effort to keep things from ever getting this far.

We saw it in the eyes of breakaway Minuteman leader James Chase in the darkness of the southern desert at midnight, he armed with a shotgun; we with nothing but our bare hearts.

We saw it in the eyes of Minuteman supporter Hal Netkin as he slammed his car into a crowd of mostly Chicano protestors as Jim Gilchrist addressed the California Coalition for Immigration Reform. Gilchrist joined the Coalition, which has been identified as a racist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Painted as American a hero by the likes of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gilchrist has been accused by a former campaign volunteer of integrating Nazi activists into his campaign for Congress.

He lost the special election, despite his endorsement by Sensenbrenner ally Tancredo.

But he put fear into Republican politicians – fear that incumbents would face vote draining, immigrant bashing third party candidates in November if they didn’t take a hard right line against migrants.

They feared Gilchrist sympathizers like the rightist California group Save Our State, which has regularly drawn organized Nazis to their protests, and which uses the exact rhetoric used by open white nationalists and supremacists – such as calling Mexican culture a “cesspool.”

The corporate media, informed time and again of Nazi, white nationalist and militia connections to the anti-migrant movement, has continued to paint the anti-migrants as part of a mainstream.

Gilchrist himself has claimed he has “240 million” supporters, despite the fact that the anti-immigrant movement as a whole could field only 700 activists for its “National Day of Protest” this year. They were outnumbered 10 to 1 wherever they turned across the country.

Even so, Tancredo, Sensenbrenner and the extreme, racist, right wing elements they represent were on the verge of a major legislative victory.

They were so close they could taste it.

Until Saturday.

Until La Gran Marcha in Los Angeles.

Then their dominance cracked.

They were on the verge of a walled off country. On the verge of migrants hunted down, rounded up by La Migra and the police – of brown skinned people disappearing in the streets and penned in concentration camps they call “detention centers.”

They were on the verge of passing a cruel law that would make all migrants without papers felons and make all Brown people suspects in a hostile nation. They were on the verge of a new ethnic cleansing of America.

And even though the mass protests of recent days have deeply shaken them, they still might win.

Sensenbrenner says he’s not intimidated.

Gilchrist, of course, is promising his followers “absolute” victory.

He says the things more seasoned power brokers won’t say. Although they’re on the same side, he says the Sensenbrenner bill doesn’t go far enough. He wants a wall from sea to sea. He wants the National Guard at the border.

He called the families who marched together “throngs of illegal alien bullies” and dubbed the mass demonstrations for basic human rights a “classic insurrection.” He pledges to stand, “stoically unmoved” - one might imagine like George Wallace on the steps of the university, facing down a lone young African woman, armed thugs in tow.

The future will be decided in the days to come. As senators debate their take on migrants, they will continue to put their fingers to the wind, to see just how far they can go without profoundly alienating their middle class allies and without provoking rebellion from below. Senate Republican leader Bill Frist plans to let two bills be debated there, including his own draconian take-off on the Sensenbrenner bill, and a softer bill, one still steeped in imperial logic, but that is not overtly fascistic.

As the debate begins this week, at least 20 LA area high schools are planning a massive walkout, on the birthday of Cesar Chavez. A national network of migrant support groups will lay out a strategy for more vast demonstrations like La Gran Marcha.

They must not stand alone. You must stand with them.

If you don’t, the dream of George Wallace’s ghost may yet come true – a racist, even fascist USA. Today, tomorrow and forever.

I've NEVER seen a story, esp a good one like this, put as a lead story and then taken off again.

You might want to realize there is a difference between the young, lone black woman wanting to go to college and the millions of illegal immigrants. You see, she was an American Citizen who had broken no law, she had the right under our Constitution to go to the University. Illegal immigrants are not United States citizens and have broken the law by entering our country illegally and are not granted rights under our constitution. These people chose to put themselves in this situation. Most American citizens do not have any problem with legal immigrants, that is what we all are. We have a problem with changing our laws because people from another country have chosen to break those laws. Wouldn't changing the laws be a slap in the face to those of us who respected the United States and her laws enough to come to this country illegally?

REPOST FROM SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER

Extremists advocate murder of immigrants, politicians

National pro-immigrant marches inspire calls for carnage from radical right

by Susy Buchanan and David Holthouse


March 30, 2006 -- Neo-Nazis and anti-immigration extremists responded to a highly publicized wave of immigration reform demonstrations in major U.S. cities with open calls for terrorist violence, including truck bombs, machine gun attacks, and assassinations of U.S. senators and congressman.

"All of you who think there's a peaceful solution to these invaders are wrong. We're going to have to start killing these people," neo-Nazi radio host Hal Turner posted to his website the day after 500,000 immigrant rights activists marched through downtown Los Angeles.

"I advocate using extreme violence against illegal aliens. Clean your guns. Have plenty of ammunition. Find out where the largest gathering of illegal aliens will be near you. Go to the area well in advance, scope out several places to position yourself and then do what has to be done."

Turner linked the post to a website titled "Ka-Fucking-Boom!" that provides detailed instructions on constructing pipe bombs, ammonium nitrate "fertilizer bombs," car bombs, chlorine gas bombs, and dozens of other homemade explosive devices.

"We are headed for civil war, folks. Are you ready?" wrote a neo-Nazi using the pseudonym "Mr. 88" (88 is movement shorthand for "Heil Hitler") in a post on the white supremacist website Stormfront. "We have to start killing in massive numbers so that the savages of the world have fear of the almighty white man again! Killing is the only way to cure these ills!"

Elected officials were also targeted for death after a U.S. Senate panel backed President Bush's guest worker plan on March 27, the Monday following a weekend of pro-immigrant street demonstrations including 20,000 people in Phoenix, 50,000 in Denver, and 50,000 in Detroit.

Hal Turner promoted a survey on his website that asked, "What method of 'communication' would be best understood by members of the United States House of Representatives and The United States Senate so they know not to give ILLEGAL ALIENS Amnesty?"

The response options included, "Pull a fire alarm in the U.S. Capitol and Machine gun them to death as they evacuate?" (earning 22 percent of more than 1,000 votes, according to Turner); "Fire Bomb their District Offices as a warning; then their private homes if they go ahead with the plan?" (31 percent); and "Park several Timothy McVeigh type truck bombs next to the House and Senate Office Buildings and Detonate them?" (13 percent).

Members of the California-based, anti-immigration hate group Save Our State added their voices to the bloodthirsty chorus. "I see people with vans driving by, gunning them down on street corners, and leaving them to feed the buzzards and worms," wrote Save Our State activist "Cazamigrante" ("Migrant hunter"). Another Save Our State member posted, "Just a friendly reminder: There is no Brady Bill on bow and arrow. There is also no report or muzzle flash to give away position."

Jim Gilchrist, co-founder of the "citizens border patrol" Minuteman Project, stopped just short of calling for his followers to pick up their guns.

"I'm not going to promote insurrection, but if it happens, it will be on the conscience of the members of Congress who are doing this," he told the Orange County Register ."I will not promote violence in resolving this, but I will not stop others who might pursue that."

The same day the Senate panel voted, more than 40,000 Los Angeles high school students walked out of classes to protest a bill in Congress that would make it a felony to be in the country illegally (it's now a federal misdemeanor). After several hundred of the students blocked a freeway, anti-immigration hardliners posting to the "Close Borders" Yahoo user group advocated killing the young protesters by running them over with cars. "If I was on that freeway, there would be some flattened kids," wrote "GoHomeIllegals."

Another Close Borders user wrote, "When violent responses occur, the amount of support they receive will amaze you. Furthermore, when people see how utterly unable to stop them the government is, it will incite further acts, and so, until it snowballs into a full-scale shooting war. Picture every major city within 500 miles of Mexico turned into Beirut in 1983. All that's missing is the spark, and it won't be long in coming."

Extremists of many stripes interpreted the widely broadcast images of hundreds of thousand of mostly Latino demonstrators marching in the streets as unmistakable evidence that a long-awaited race war had finally begun.

"The bad news is many whites will die," wrote one neo-Nazi on Vanguard News Network. "It is imperative that you make proper connections NOW and form networks of like minded armed whites to defend yourselves... It will be grand. More exciting then the Zombie flicks. If you have a good defense line and lots of ammo the carnage will be orgasmic."

Susy Buchanan and David Holthouse are writers for the Intelligence Report.

Tina: people who enter illegally have some Constitutional rights. That's really how it works, though you might not believe it.

The idea is that people get their rights from "their Creator" not from the State. This idea of "the rights of man" is one of the foundations of American democracy. It's a powerful idea, and the fact that the anti-immigrant forces are destroying and attacking this idea is disgusting.

It's amazing that with all the big crises we face ... Climate Change and so on ... that we have to have this society-wide dialogue about whether or not to treat honest workers (from both sides of the "border(s)") like humans ... or not. It's disgusting and it really makes me want to take drastic action against the super rich (on both sides of the border(s).) ... OK, but I really wanted to suggest that this whole discussion ... the fact that their is even such a fuss over "immigrants" ... is really just a testament to the fact that NAFTA has failed.

Does anyone remember when NAFTA was being rammed down our throats and all these bought off Congress people got up to go on and on about how NAFTA was going to elevate the status of people on both sides of the border. We were all going to benefit and get good jobs from all the trade that was going to be created in this new big, happy free trade zone. Well, what happened? If workers are still miserable ... if the newer white immigrants in Arizona have nothing better to do but hang out in the desert and point guns at their brown skinned worker compatriots ... if workers of any color or background are expected to work long hours and not have access to health care - hasn't NAFTA failed miserably?

This isn't about "white racism"... it's about the freaking law. The 'white racism' charge is just a tool of convenience made by those who have no respect for the law.

It's also about hispanic arrogance.. arrogance that actually demands that we ignore our own laws.

...it's also about assimilation....that's the LAST thing the little 'jefitos' at La Raza and Mecha.....they want ALL the frijoles for their OWN burritos........well,Uncle Sam wants them frijoles for HIS burrito,by God......and he isn't going to share them with the 'jefitos'.

the racism charge is dishonest and intellectually lazy.

Man, YOUR comment is dishonest and lazy, not the article. If yu can't back it up, shut up.