The “Minuteman Project,” now rebaptized as the “Minuteman Civil Defense Corps,” is the largest of several vigilante groups that are on the cutting edge of the anti-immigrant backlash. The Minutemen are shot through with fascist outfits like the Ku Klux Klan, National Socialist Movement Nazis, “neo”-Nazi skinheads and their ilk. These are not just racist bigots: they are armed and dangerous. In the media-hyped Minuteman “border patrols” in Arizona last year, participants were photographed sporting AR-15 automatic rifles and 9 mm. pistols. These racist vigilantes and nativist fascists seek to terrorize immigrants, while going after leftists, labor and even liberals. As we wrote last fall:

“Their aim is to goad the federal government into launching an all-out round-up of ‘illegal’ foreign-born workers.… [T]he immigrant-bashing thugs must not merely be protested, they should be run out by the overwhelming power of the organized working class. Revolutionaries seek to mobilize the unions to come out in force to chase off the fascist vermin who represent a danger to the safety and well-being of the minority, immigrant and working-class population. Militant worker-immigrant defense must be organized to disperse these would-be killers while their forces are small and vulnerable.”

–“For Militant Workers Defense of Immigrants!” The Internationalist No. 22, September-October 2005

Importantly, this past May the San Francisco/Oakland, California Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) passed a motion urging the ILWU to “continue its principled fight for the rights of immigrant workers by calling for an end to the deportations, granting full citizenship rights and mobilizing the labor movement against racist attacks by Minutemen.”

Jim Gilchrist, co-founder of the “Minutemen,” is coming to Ground Zero in New York City to promote his new book, subtitled “The Battle to Secure America’s Borders,” which purports to be a “how to” manual on organizing violent racist hate groups. Gilchrist wants to spew out his anti-immigrant hate-mongering by using the September 11 (2001) attack on the World Trade Center, in which many immigrant workers died. In the same way, the United States government has used “9-11” as a battle cry for its “war on terror,” launching an imperialist war on Afghanistan and then Iraq in an attempt to terrorize the world into submission to the U.S. diktat.

The publication of an idiot’s guide to racist vigilantism is one more gimmick by an outfit that has focused on publicity-grabbing stunts to market its xenophobic (anti-foreigner) message. Gilchrist runs for Congress in Orange County, California, speaks at the National Press Club in Washington and is interviewed by “Lou Dobbs Tonight” on CNN, while Minuteman co-leader Chris Simcox appears frequently on the Fox News show “Hannity & Colmes” in order to gain a “respectable” image for their immigrant-bashing. The media portray their antics as “citizen activism” and “volunteerism,” as if they were collecting money for United Fund charities or a blood drive.

But this is just a mask, like Louisiana KKKer David Duke who exchanged his white hood and robes for a suit and tie to run for office in a “white flight” suburb of New Orleans. But “Klan in a suit” Duke and “Minuteman” Gilchrist are sinister figures. What the media don’t report is how the Minutemen and related vigilante groups are infested with Nazis, Klansmen, long-time white supremacist militia men, etc. Gilchrist ally Barbara Coe, head of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, belongs to the Council of Conservative Citizens, remnants of the White Citizens Councils that terrorized blacks and murdered civil rights workers in Mississippi and Alabama in the 1950s and ’60s.

Lately, the Minutemen and their various fronts have been lurking in front of offices of left groups around the country, such as outside Revolution Books in New York, and even outside the Manhattan office of Democratic war hawk Hillary Clinton, champion of militarizing the Mexican border. In Los Angeles on July 8, some 250 “Minutemen” managed to trigger a vicious assault on leftist counterdemonstrators by paramilitary L.A. cops. As the racists taunted “commies” and supporters of MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán), police dragged out leftist demonstrators, repeatedly kicking them in the kidneys, beating them on the head with riot sticks and pistol-whipping a young white woman. The Minuteman carried a gloating video of this on their website.

This is a classic provocation, and no doubt these fascist provocateurs would love to do the same in New York. But their wider aim is to provoke a police-state crackdown on immigrants, a policy supported by significant sections of the capitalist ruling class. The drive for “immigration reform” to “control our borders” is supported by both Democrats and Republicans. Like the fascist fringe groups, they portray this as part of the war on terror. Over the last century imperialist wars have regularly been accompanied by scapegoating immigrants as the “enemy within.” 

The response of many immigrants’ rights groups and much of  the left has been to pressure the Democrats with calls for “amnesty,” as if undocumented immigrants had committed some crime, and for some kind of “road to citizenship.” In reality, what is happening is not a push to legalize undocumented immigrants but a drive to illegalize them and prepare the way for round-ups, putting tens of thousands in concentration camps (the contracts have already been awarded to Halliburton) and mass deportations. Instead of begging for “amnesty” like the opportunist left which tails after the Democrats, the Internationalist Group calls for full citizenship rights for all immigrants and seeks to forge a revolutionary workers party that defends all the oppressed. n