Hold on a minute

There are a lot of wack-jobs here in America. There are a lot of people who have a crazy agenda. They will hoot and holler and do anything that is necessary to get on the news and get people to hear about it. When I first heard of the Minuteman Project, I thought these guys were probably more of the same, probably some wacked-out conservatives who hated Mexicans and didn't want them stealin' good ole American jobs. \nI think that was unfair, and I might have been wrong about these guys.\nFor those of you who don't know who the Minutemen are, they are a citizen's group that has taken it upon themselves to patrol a 25-mile stretch of the Arizona-Mexico border, where, according to www.CNN.com, 51 percent of the half million undocumented workers who come to America yearly enter.\nThe Minutemen do this because they feel the federal government is not doing enough to protect the integrity of the 1,950 mile America-Mexico border and that this is leading to a sizable illegal population. They believe that population is not adequately integrating into society at large and is creating a dangerous security risk. The Minutemen fear there are those among the undocumented aliens who bring crime and drugs with them. \nThe Minutemen have been under the fire of liberal groups saying the Minutemen are racists and supremacists. However, the Minutemen claim on their Web site they are merely trying to "bring national awareness to the decades-long careless disregard of effective U.S. immigration law enforcement."\nWhether or not the emboldened statement on their Web site declaring they have " ... no affiliation with, nor will (they) accept any assistance by or interference from separatists, racists or supremacy groups or individuals, no matter what their race, color, or creed" is true, remains to be seen. They claim to be doing "the job that Congress refuses to do." \nThese guys don't sound all that crazy to me.\nNow, I am sure there are people who would want to get involved with the Minuteman Project, who have less noble motives than the ones claimed by the Minutemen themselves. Still, I can't help but feel respect for these people, who are operating entirely within the law, and who are bringing attention to a situation that too often is not adequately dealt with in the mainstream media. \nBut while I respect the ideas behind the claimed motives of the Minutemen, i.e. defending the integrity of our borders and ensuring that all immigration is legal, I am certainly not anti-immigration. How could I be? I am the great-grandson on both sides of people who emigrated from Europe. My Irish family left Ireland to look for better working conditions and greener pastures here in America ( ending up in Newark, N.J.), and my Italian great-grandfather, who was a Mafioso, left Italy a step ahead of the police. I remember that America is a nation of immigrants. I also understand the difference between the way that my family came to this country and the way that a half million undocumented "immigrants" enter the country every year, and that difference is legality.\nThe legal immigration I think we should make the standard in America would ensure the 500,000 illegals from South America will be guaranteed American-style human and civil rights. Legal immigrants would be guaranteed a fair wage, Social Security (for the time being, at least) and the right to vote, to find their own political voice. While I understand the motivation that draws undocumented workers to America, sympathy toward their plight should not corrupt our system of immigration.