Mark Edwards, President of Wake America Foundation, appears disappointed early Saturday afternoon at the size of the audience—about 200 people—spread thinly around Cashman Theatre to hear speaker after speaker denounce the country's immigration policy as part of the Unite To Fight Against Illegal Immigration Summit. He tells us, "Las Vegas is a great city, but it also captures people and they get hung out on tables and we hope that happens to a few and (maybe) that is why the crowd is a little lighter than I'd like to see."
Edwards says this while introducing Chris Simcox from a group called Civil Homeland Defense. Simcox is one of the media stars of the Minuteman border patrol in Arizona. Simcox was welcomed with a standing ovation and the applause continued as he crowed about the success of that adventure in deterring illegal entry along the 27 miles of border in his neighborhood ("In fact, border patrol are driving around trying to find something to do") and demanding that the government devote massive resources to preventing all illegal entry into the United States ("We want our borders secure ... no exceptions").
None of this sits well with Robert Gallegos, president of Raz Pac, and one of an almost equal number of protestors gathered in front of Cashman. Gallegos says of the Unite To Fight Against Illegal Immigration Summit: "This is just a front for racism. They are racists by their attitudes and what they say. They instill fear in the American public."
Simcox, on the other hand, is driven to conniptions by the presence of a Mexican flag among the protestors. "All of those people out there have no allegiance to the United States of America. Those people out there flying the Mexican flag, they should be deported. They are domestic terrorists. They have no allegiance to this nation. If they are not going to pledge an allegiance to this nation then they are an enemy of the state."
Walking back and forth to do interviews with "the racists" in Cashman and "the domestic terrorists" outside, it occurred to me that if immigration is an issue that screams for compromise right now, the dialogue is just between the screamers. Certainly, Gallegos is correct that elements of the summit were making ridiculous assertions to scare people, and, despite the ostensible focus only on illegal immigration, the distinction wasn't always clear. Also, ethnicity certainly seemed to get plenty of attention from the activists at the summit.
A handout credited to the California Coalition for Immigration Reform available inside Cashman warned that if immigration continues unchecked, "energy, gas, water and food will be rationed." (Does anyone seriously believe that is a possibility? If for no other reason, the scenario is ridiculous because a country that is doing so badly that it is in need of rationing food and water would, of course, stop being attractive to immigrants who would go someplace else where there is plenty to eat and drink.) This warning, by the way, is based not on illegal immigration—the presumptive sole point of the Unite to Fight Against Illegal Immigration Summit—but on a combined total of legal and illegal immigrants.
Meanwhile, posted on a bulletin board underneath the banner for the conference were three maps of Los Angeles County showing breakdown by ethnic population. One was from 1970, the next from 1990 and the final one from 2000. Placed together the maps showed a massive swelling of the ethnic Hispanic population over the past three decades. But what does that have to do with illegal immigration? Once again no distinction was made between legal and illegal residents; the maps disconcertingly focused only on ethnicity and race.
Still, despite Gallegos' assertion to me that the participants in Unite to Fight Against Illegal Immigration are mostly supporters of Aryan Nation, there were quite clearly a number of speakers at the summit with absolutely no ethnic or racial agenda. For example, Joan Molinaro, a speaker who is with the group 9/11 Families for a Secure America, seemed as focused on the Canadian border as the Mexican one and, most of all, understandably, on airline access.
"My son was one of the firefighters murdered on 9-11. They came into this country with forged documents; though they were not eligible they were given drivers licenses that allowed them on those planes and let them turn those planes into missiles. You have to protect the country first. I am talking about all of the borders. I don't care where you come from, if you are in this country illegally then you should not have a driver's license that allows you on a plane. I can't tell the difference between an honest illegal alien and a terrorist. How do I tell them apart? It is better to err on the side of caution."
Can anyone deny she has a point even if sending the National Guard to the borders is not a practical solution outside of the fantasies of Fox commentators? After all, how many soldiers, dollars and resources would it take to patrol every foot of the continent-wide border between the United States and Canada? Is there an alternative?
Inside Cashman, Simcox talks of illegal immigrants; outside, Gallegos only refers to undocumented workers. Yet, though they will probably never hang out long enough to discover it, in interviewing both Simcox and Gallegos they have a surprising amount of common ground on the basic issues of immigration. Both say that the Mexican and United States governments have implicitly created and failed to address the problem at the border in consort. Both tell me that immigration laws are hopelessly out of date and that some program will be necessary to work out the situation and in the long run that plan will mean giving legal status to numerous residents without the proper paperwork. Obviously, Simcox is more grudging on this point:
"I think we are going to have to compromise on that by saying that if our government secures the border and forces legal immigration, we can somehow allow these people to come out of the shadows."