David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klansman and neo-Nazi, wrote a screed that year that he distributed to his fellow white supremacists:
We are fighting for the preservation of our heritage, freedom and way of life in the United States and much of the Western World. Ultimately, we are working to secure the most important civil right of all, the right to preserve our kind of life. Massive immigration and low European American birthrates coupled with integration and racial intermarriage threatens the continued existence of our very genotype. We assert that we, as do all expressions of life on this planet, have the right to live and to have our children and our children’s children reflect both genetically and culturally our heritage.
The numbers of immigrants continued to rise, reaching a peak in 2007, when the population of undocumented workers hit 12.2 million, an increase of 3.6 million over the previous year. But by then, the backlash was well under way.
Much of this nativist backlash, which could be found on right-wing radio, on cable talk shows, on websites and blogs and YouTube videos, was predicated on a set of myths about immigrants that were largely created and promoted by nativist anti-immigrant organizations such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), myths that were stark inversions of factual reality. These myths nonetheless came to be widely embraced by conservative pundits and their audiences. Four of the most prevalent were the following:
•Immigrants bring crime to their communities. In reality, numerous studies of the crime rates among various ethnic and immigrant communities clearly demonstrate that immigrants generally, and Latinos especially, commit crime at a significantly lower rate than occurs in the white and general populations.
•Immigrants take jobs away from Americans. The vast majority of undocumented Latino immigrants are employed in low-paying, low-skilled jobs that require hard labor and that employers have extreme difficulty filling without an immigrant labor pool. So in reality immigrants are doing jobs that Americans won’t take. Numerous economic studies have demonstrated that having a substantial immigrant labor pool is an essential ingredient to creating more higher- and middle-wage jobs in the larger economy.
•Immigrants bring disease with them. This is a bald-faced lie unsupported by credible data. But it does serve as a rationale for eliminationist thinking. Disease rates in immigrant communities are roughly the same as in other communities, and the Centers for Disease Control has no data indicating that immigrants are prone to bringing exotic diseases with them.
•They don’t want to become Americans by learning to speak English. Most immigrant communities in US history have been faced with this canard, dating back to when Germans and Japanese immigrants faced similar accusations that they didn’t want to assimilate. Similarly they were told they would never be “real Americans,” but history has shown this to be untrue. Immigrant communities are frequently made up of people with lower education levels who have not had the opportunity to study English. Moreover, because of the hostility they often generate, immigrant communities have also long tended to form insular neighborhoods where they speak their native languages freely. History has demonstrated time and again that this insularity always breaks down over time. And many non-immigrant communities, ethnic and otherwise, are also quite insular by choice.
The larger narrative arc created by these myths was that “white culture” was under attack in the form of this “invasion” of brown faces speaking foreign tongues. This narrative not only became the core of the nativist and white-supremacist assault on immigration but also was the essential story told to the public on right-wing media such as Fox News, as well as on such ostensibly mainstream networks as CNN, where Lou Dobbs for many years held forth on the dangers of immigration.
On one of his nightly Fox broadcasts, Bill O’Reilly angrily explained the problem:
Now in 1986, President Reagan thought he could solve the [immigration] problem by granting about three million illegal aliens amnesty. The New York Times was in heaven, editorializing back then, quote, “The new law won’t work miracles but it will induce most employers to pay attention, to turn off the magnets, to slow the tide.” Of course, just the opposite happened. But the Times hasn’t learned a thing. That’s because the newspaper and many far-left thinkers believe the white power structure that controls America is bad, so a drastic change is needed.
According to the lefty zealots, the white Christians who hold power must be swept out by a new multicultural tide, a rainbow coalition, if you will. This can only happen if demographics change in America.
The first attempt to start a border militia was made by David Duke and some pals of his from the Ku Klux Klan. “We believe very strongly white people are becoming second-class citizens. When I think of America, I think of a white country.” Duke uttered those words in October 1977 while speaking to assembled newspaper and TV reporters at the US-Mexico border crossing in San Ysidro, California.
Duke had announced that he and a couple of carfuls of robed Klansmen would hold a press conference at the border crossing to tell the public about his latest project: a “Klan Border Watch” that he claimed would enlist KKK members from around the nation to show up armed and ready to catch illegal border crossers. But Duke’s project quickly fell apart amid internecine bickering with his fellow neo-Nazis.
The concept, however, lingered on among white supremacists, played a role in some of the movement that took off in the 1990s, and eventually led to the idea of having ordinary patriots form citizen militias. One of the people who picked up the idea in that era was Glenn Spencer, a retired California businessman who began agitating against immigration in 1993 and formed his militiaoriented organization, American Patrol, in 1995. Its website spread Reconquista conspiracy theories, white-supremacist eugenics, and anti-Latino hatred. “The Mexican culture is based on deceit,” he once wrote. “Chicanos and Mexicanos lie as a matter of survival.”
Most of all, Spencer promoted the idea of having citizen militias to act as eyes and ears on the border so that more illegal crossers could be caught, and perhaps to arrest them themselves. In 2001, Spencer packed his bags and moved his operation to a ranch outside rural Sierra Vista, Arizona. At about the same time, the militia idea caught on with a couple of Arizona ranchers named Jack Foote and Casey Nethercott, who organized a militiaesque armed outfit called Ranch Rescue that prowled the Arizona borderlands from 2002 to 2003, harassing border crossers when they found them. They finally ran afoul of the law when they assaulted and sicced a dog on a couple of Salvadoran immigrants who were caught crossing ranchland that the militiamen were guarding. The two vigilantes eventually were put out of business by a lawsuit filed on behalf of the terrorized couple.
The border-militias story attracted some media attention, but Foote and Nethercott were sketchy characters whom reporters shied away from interviewing, and Spencer was not very mediagenic. It took a former schoolteacher from California to get the media’s attention—a fellow who made his living in part by playing one of the doomed gunmen in the daily re-creation for tourists of the Gun-fight at the OK Corral in Tombstone.
Chris Simcox was a youthful, slightly scruffy man who had moved to Arizona from California in the early 2000s and become an ardent desert rat. With a ready grin and a pleasant voice, he had an all-American demeanor that TV reporters who started coming in 2003 soon found appealing, as he described his adventures with his newly organized Tombstone Border Militia and the urgent need to have better border security because of the “invasion” from Mexico.
The attitudes that were roaming the desert with Simcox’s patrols were voiced by one participant caught by a documentary filmmaker who filmed an exercise by Simcox’s militia group, now renamed Tombstone Civil Defense Corps. As cattle roamed in the background, the militiaman turned to the cameraman and said, “No, we ought to be able to shoot the Mexicans on sight, and that would end the problem. After two or three are shot, they’ll stop crossing the border. And they’ll take their cows home, too.”
Simcox was