Friends and Elites, Chickens and Coyotes: The border games along California's southern border have taken on an ugly leftist coloring
Custred, Glynn
Friends and Elites, and Coyotes San Diego ADE ROWLEY WAS IN THE MILITARY for 23 years and for a time commanded a National Guard unit sent to improve the infrastructure along the United...
...Authorities on both sides did not want the press to transmit images of rock-throwers and border jumpers during the press conference...
...BY GLYNN CUSTRED NOVEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 29 FRIENDS AND ELITES Mexican president Vicente Fox referred to the migrants who violate the law and the sovereignty of the United States as "heroes...
...Border Patrol apprehension figures indicate that the number is enormous, especially when you realize that the Border Patrol only apprehends about one in five illegal entrants...
...San Diego Police Department were posted to keep a lookout, and observers from the sheriff's office were there, along with a California Highway Patrolman and two Border Patrol back-up units...
...A companion organization is the Pacific Council on International Policy, which regards immigration as a means to its transnational end...
...Rowley speaks more with sadness than anger of an elder neighbor who carries a gun...
...Garcia says that those remittances "are like a monthly welfare check for the Mexican economy...
...They intend to show that border control is possible and spur Congress and the President to take seriously their responsibilities to protect citizens from foreign dangers...
...The figure of 3,000 illegal crossings a day has been suggested and the number of illegal crossings for last year has been estimated at a million...
...But the official launch happened n September 16 and took the form of a press conference held at the border fence in San Ysidro where the international line ends...
...Mean-while, dogs are poisoned, or their throats cut...
...But they do believe that their presence will greatly magnify the effectiveness of the undermanned and overwhelmed Border Patrol...
...People in east San Diego County now often go armed as they do along the Arizona border...
...cars are hijacked and residents threatened...
...The protesters hurled racial slurs at him even as they called the volunteers "racists...
...EANWHILE, PEOPLE LIVING on the border like Wade Rowley and his neighbors remain under siege...
...A border open for illegal aliens is also open for drug smugglers who mix with the flow or use their own routes of entry...
...They are also mobile and determined, and some may be on the payroll of the drug cartels...
...He liked the rural portion of east county San Diego, and 15 years ago moved there with his family...
...See "Where Are My Juice and Crackers...
...For 40 years, says Aquilar Zinser, Cubans have "infiltrated the fissures of the American political system and have found a permanent ally in the Republican right...
...Vicente Fox has even more grandiose designs, calling for the creation of a transnational North America in a "new framework" which he says "is in-spired in the example of the European Union...
...Using other indicators, economists and demographers, as well as the Mexican government, say that the number maybe as high as 20 mil-lion...
...These are globalists with a transnational vision for North America...
...Mexico is not a poor country," he said, "but the people are poor...
...The two forces together, the street left and the drug smugglers, should alert the public that the rosy scenario of a willing worker trying to hitch up with a willing employer is an incomplete picture of the immigration issue...
...The street leftists, on the other hand, use the tactics of the Storm Troopers of Nazi Germany and the Red Guards of Communist China...
...While many Americans find these problems disturbing, their political representatives refuse to dealwith them...
...The organization claims influence on the Bush administration...
...This re-designation is more than mere rhetoric...
...In the same way a growing Mexican and Mexican-American population north of the border will allow Mexico to make common cause with the American left, whom he identifies as "liberal Democrats, unions and Civil Rights and social movements...
...Ten officers of the This dereliction of duty has led to the formation of the Minutemen and the Friends of the Border Patrol...
...Friends and Elites, and Coyotes San Diego ADE ROWLEY WAS IN THE MILITARY for 23 years and for a time commanded a National Guard unit sent to improve the infrastructure along the United StatesMexico border in California...
...In 1995, Zedillo told an audience in Dallas, Texas, "You're Mexicans—Mexicans who live north of the border," and in Chicago in 1997 he told a convention of the political organization La Raza "that the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders and that Mexican immigrants are an important—a very important—part of this...
...Glynn Custred is professor of anthropology at California State University, Hayward, and coauthor of the California Civil Rights Initiative, Proposition 209...
...Other organizations, kept afloat by the Ford Foundation and others, are using lobbying tactics and lawsuits to keep the border open...
...ENDER ITS PREVIOUS PRESIDENT, Ernesto Zedillo, Mexico changed its identity from a Latin American nation to a North American country...
...Wade Rowley says many migrants hazard the illegal journey under pressure from a Mexican elite that has no interest in taking care of them...
...The organization was originally designed to purchase equipment, such as bulletproof vests, for Border Patrol agents...
...Like others who had moved to that part of the country, he expected a quiet rural life...
...The vehicle had tires resistant to the spike strips police lay down to stop escaping cars and trucks...
...One lady on her way to look after her neighbors' pets was waylaid by passing illegal aliens and murdered for her car...
...When the volunteers assembled, leftist pro-testers, some with facemasks and shouting obscenities, were there to meet them...
...Garcia cited as the reason so many people were streaming across the border that Mexico treats its people badly...
...Asked about the Minutemen then keeping watch over the border in Arizona, Derbrez said they should be prosecuted...
...Also, only those volunteers who are former or current law enforcement officers will be armed...
...So the Border Patrol alerted their Mexican liaison and be-fore long the hill above the border fence was lined with Mexican soldiers...
...Like the Minutemen, however, many of the California group are retired, some former law enforcement and military personnel, school administrators, businessmen, engineers, etc., representing a broad sector of the responsible and civic-minded middle class...
...We're desperate for help...
...They became more aggressive, more brazen, more dangerous...
...We have to confront what I dare to call the Anglo-Saxon prejudice against the establishment of supra-national organizations," he says...
...Donna Tisdale, who with her husband owns a 400-acre ranch a mile north of the border, says, "This is organized crime in our neighGLYNN CUSTRED borhood...
...The next day the Friends of the Border Patrol held a training session, and they invited the press to watch...
...The Pew Hispanic Center, basing its calculations on census data, says that there are 11 million people residing illegally in the United States...
...The IMPP urged Presidents Fox and Bush when they first entered office to move beyond "absolute sovereignty," calling for "the reconceptionalization of the common border and the border region as a line of convergence rather than separation" in which "a North America with gradually disappearing border controls" would emerge with "permanent migration remaining at moderate levels...
...At first the border crossers would stop and ask for water, which Rowley says he always gave them...
...This article is a continuation of his coverage of tensions along the U.S...
...Already a bounty has been put on the head of one organizer of a border watch project...
...Eventually the temper of the illegal aliens changed...
...They blared at them with bull horns and trampled an American flag, boasting, "We're going to ruin your weekend...
...This dereliction of duty has led to the formation of the Minutemen and the Friends of the Border Patrol...
...Some very violent ideological and criminal forces are determined to keep the border open...
...Adolfo Aquilar Zinser, former Mexican national security adviser and later Mexican ambassador to the UN, writes that Jews and Cubans enjoy leverage in American politics, and that Mexicans and their descendants could imitate them...
...Recently a California Highway Patrol car collided with a wrong-way driver on I-8 some 30 miles east of San Diego...
...Among them is the Foreign Relations Council, whose plan for a New North America is clearly stated in a recent publication Building a North American Community...
...One observer noted cynically that the coyotes sometimes shepherd the chickens across the border, then eat them...
...That mass emigration is a safety valve for the Mexican elite is so obvious they don't even deny it...
...And "if people could not cross the border," he added, "great social pressure would begin to build on the government of Mexico, because the people would start to demand the government resolve their need for work...
...Immigrants who have developed labor, family, cultural, social and political net32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2005 works on both sides of the border," says the council, are "key actors in the development and evolution of `transnationalism...
...Before the press conference began about 30 protestors arrived waving a Mexican flag, playing Mariachi music, and chanting the refrain from a popular song, "I didn't cross the border, the border crossed me...
...Upon entering office Mexican president Vicente Fox referred to the migrants who violate the law and the sovereignty of the United States as "heroes," and in April Mexican foreign secretary Luis Ernesto Derbrez, in a speech de-livered at the Texas Pan-American University at Edinburgh, Texas, declared as inevitable the "complete integration" of the populations of the United States and Mexico...
...They have "abducted the politics of the United States for the island," he says, "obtaining privileged treatment for its migrants and monopolizing political power in Florida...
...There is a very large difference between the Minutemen, the Friends of the Border Patrol (and other border watch groups), and the street leftists that attacked them in San Diego...
...And then there's the money, an estimated $17 billion each year in remittances flowing from Mexicans 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2005working in the United States to Mexico which constitutes the country's second largest source of income after oil...
...The left is not confined to the storm trooper division...
...In some cases, instead of asking for food or water, they would kick down doors to get it...
...As the volume increased, not just groups of men going north for work but entire families tramped through people's yards day and night, littering the countryside with trash, leaving gates open, letting stock stray, and breaking fences...
...southwestern border...
...Five men, probably illegal aliens, escaped on foot, leaving behind 700 pounds of marijuana...
...Also falling into this group is the Migration Policy Institute, formerly the International Migration Policy Program (IMPP) of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace...
...They envision a "seamless North American market" with "the extension of full labor mobility" to Mexico...
...Help was offered by Andy Ramirez from Chino, California, to head a volunteer organization called Friends of the Border Patrol...
...But as these volunteers become more effective, a new problem arises: smugglers, especially from the major drug cartels, will target these civilian spotters...
...Former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castaneda wrote in the Atlantic Monthly, as far back as 1995, that "any attempt to clamp down on immigration from the south [by the United States]—by sealing the border militarily, by forcing Mexico to deter its citizens from emigrating or through a federal version of Proposition 187—will make social peace in the barrios and pueblos of Mexico untenable...
...These are resourceful and desperate criminals who will let nothing stand in their 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2005 Chickens The border games along California's southern border have taken on an ugly leftist coloring...
...As long as they [the government] have their monthly welfare," he says, "there will be no change...
...The Mexican foreign ministry has also published a 32-page manual, in comic book for-mat for easy comprehension, titled The Guide for the Mexican Migrant, with tips on how to cross the border and then evade detection...
...The entire episode was caught on videotape by one of the volunteers and shown on local television that night (see www.friendsofthebordrpatrol.org...
...Let us hope that what has started as a border watch triggers a national citizens' movement, not just to stand watch in the desert but to demonstrate in Washington...
...This joint Mexican-American effort to avoid bad publicity illustrates once again that if George Bush and Mexican president Fox really wanted to end the border problem they could do it rapidly...
...The events of September 16 and 17 in San Diego mark a new and more violent phase of the Minute-man movement...
...He also gave them food and sometimes even dry clothes...
...The difference between the Minutemen and Ramirez's project is that Ramirez will not station volunteers on the government road that parallels the border, as do the Minutemen, but on private property where spotters will report illegal movement to the Border Patrol...
...Also so-called coyotes—people smugglers—often rob, rape, and desert the people they bring across, nicknamed in Mexico pollos, chickens...
...There are also very influential and wealthy groups and individuals who while not leftists themselves share their goal of dismantling the border...
...They even drive on the wrong way of freeways to avoid Border Patrol checkpoints...
...way...
...But more than just people dumping and remittances are driving Mexico's emigration policy...
...As time went on, though, he and his neighbors found themselves increasingly under siege as the wave of illegal migration across the border increased...
...The ordinary people of America, in other words, are the obstacle to this vision...
...The volunteers know they can't stop the historic migration on their own...
...The Minutemen and the others follow the model of the neighborhood watch program designed by the National Sheriff's Association...
...It is a shame, he says, that a 75-year-old widow in her own home feels safe only when she has a Glock on her hip...
...Andy Ramirez is an American from Mexican stock that goes back three generations...
...Whatever the number we see an enormous and persistent flow across the border, feeding a growing illegal population within the United States that brings with it a multitude of problems...
...Later, in the border town of Calexico, a contingent of 300 marched to cheer their victory over the "racists...
...Consequently, the Mexican government actively encourages mass emigration...
...For example, vehicles carrying drugs and aliens race from the border to the interior at high speeds with their lights off...
...They turned over the registration table, stole documents, and shoved volNOVEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 31 FRIENDS AND ELITES unteers...
...They are so important that the Mexican government is in the process of allowing absentee voting for them...
...property is damaged and goods are stolen...
...Among the proponents of this plan are former Mexican finance minister Pedro Aspe, former Deputy Prime Minister and former Minister of Finance for Canada John P. Manly, and former United States Attorney General and former Governor of Massachusetts William Weld...
...The Mexican government has even organized a special police force, Grupo Beta, for the "protection for migrants" as they sneak across the border...
...TAS, July/August 2005...
...In May, the Mexico City daily Excelsior interviewed a man they identified only as a Mexican-American merchant by the name of Juan Garcia...
...But when the Minuteman Project was initiated in Arizona, a volunteer citizen border watch that acted as added eyes and ears for the Border Patrol, Ramirez offered to organize a similar watch team in California to help beleaguered property owners...
...The Border Patrol had gotten word that another group of protesters were headed for the Mexican side of the border...
...Al DY RAMIREZ'S BORDER WATCH started informal-y in August...
...No one knows how many people cross the border illegally each year...
Vol. 38 • November 2005 • No. 9
