Illegal Immigration: a Serious Problem for the United States

Introduction

The growing wave of illegal immigrants entering the United States in recent decades and the U.S. government's failure to stop or slow that wave have spawned a number of organizations that oppose illegal immigration and advocate for better immigration enforcement. These organizations conduct research on and advocate for immigration issues in Washington, D.C., and some, such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), have become quite well known as experts on the subject of illegal immigration, often testifying before Congress and providing information to news sources. (Bill, 12-15)

Thesis Statement

Illegal immigration is a serious problem for the United States.

Discussion

One of the most famous and controversial of the organizations opposed to illegal immigration is the Minuteman Project, a group founded in 2004 by Jim Gilchrist, a former newspaper reporter and retired California certified public accountant, and Chris Simcox, a former kindergarten teacher in Los Angeles, California. The group is named after the volunteer soldiers called "minutemen," who pledged to fight the British on a minute's notice during America's Revolutionary War. The Minuteman Project is a grassroots volunteer organization, and its goal is to monitor immigration issues and push for more effective enforcement of U.S. immigration laws. (Bill, 20)

The controversy surrounding the Minuteman Project has to do largely with the group's protest activities, which often involve rallying large numbers of activists to a symbolic location to dramatize the problem of illegal immigration. In April 2005, for example, Gilchrist organized between nine hundred and fifteen hundred volunteers along a twenty-mile stretch of the Mexico-Arizona border for an entire month. Volunteers monitored the border and called the U.S. Border Patrol when they observed illegal crossings, and the group claimed that 335 apprehensions were directly facilitated by its activities. The Minuteman Project also said that their presence dramatically reduced the number of attempted illegal crossings from an average of about eight hundred per day to only about thirteen per day. After the group withdrew its volunteers, residents noticed a marked increase in the numbers of illegal immigrants crossing the border. Minuteman spokespersons said the vigil showed that slowing illegal immigration is, indeed, possible. As Jim Gilchrist said in a May 2, 2005, Christian Science Monitor article, "We did ... what all of the lobbyists couldn't do in 10 years and Congress couldn't do in 40 years—effectively protect the border from incoming illegals, terrorists, and drug traffickers." (Hayworth, 36-40)

More recently, in May 2006, the group staged a cross-country caravan to counter the immigrant rights marches organized by pro-immigrant groups. A small group of about three hundred volunteers began the trip by gathering for a vigil in the Crenshaw section of Los Angeles, a largely black neighborhood, to highlight the negative impact illegal immigration is having on local employment. The caravan planned to travel to twelve different cities in ten days, stopping in each one to hold anti-illegal-immigration rallies. The rally locations included Phoenix, the capital of Arizona, a state ...