Illegal immigration at the street corner level

Houston Chronicle:

It's become a Saturday morning ritual on a street corner in Spring.

Two dozen U.S. Border Watch volunteers, some wearing combat boots and military-style garb, face off with Hispanic day laborers and a half-dozen of their supporters.

''Stop the hate! Stop the fear! Immigrants are welcome here!" boomed a woman's voice recently over a portable loudspeaker.

''Thou Shall not Steal America," reads a sign waved by a member of Border Watch, a group based in Spring.

A similar scene has unfolded over the past months at the busy intersection of Steubner-Airline and Wimbelton Estates Drive in northwest Harris County. The day laborers, many of them undocumented, gather each morning in the Speedo gas station parking lot.

And nearly every Saturday morning since September, dozens of Border Watch members have attempted to drive them away. They chant slogans, wave signs and film employers who pick up immigrants for work.

Far from the halls of Congress and the front lines of the Southwest border, the divisive immigration debate is being played out in local neighborhoods, including the Houston area. A number of groups have upped the ante by moving from debate to confrontation, attempting to take immigration duties into their own hands.

Since the Minuteman group staged a border surveillance operation in Arizona in 2005, more than 250 new anti-immigrant groups have formed, said Mark Potok, director of Southern Poverty Law Center's intelligence project, which monitors such organizations.

''There's been a prairie fire in the last couple of years — these groups have really exploded," Potok said.

In April, the center listed 144 ''Nativist Extremist" organizations that go beyond debate and target individuals, Potok said. There are 13 immigration-related activist groups in Texas, and Border Watch was among three in the Houston area.

"The most significant danger posed by these groups is the poisoning of the democratic debate" about immigration levels, Potok said. Instead, the groups have turned ''the discussion into a diatribe about how Mexicans are destroying our culture, bringing diseases to our country and killing dozens of Americans every day," he said.

The president of Border Watch, Curtis S. Collier, said his members don't have a racist agenda. Their goal is simple: Expel the millions of illegal immigrants in the United States.

''To be racist, you have to target someone because of their race," Collier said. ''We don't care who you are. If you're here illegally we want you to go home. It's not about being brown-skinned, it's about being illegal."

Doris Meissner, who headed the Immigration and Naturalization Service during the Clinton era, said groups such as Border Watch have proliferated due to frustration over the government's inability to control illegal immigration. And while Meissner characterized the groups as ''spot outbreaks," she considers them a threat.

''They are dangerous because they do border on vigilante activity," said Meissner, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.

But groups lobbying for limited immigration see the growing activism differently.

Dan Stein, president of the Federation of Americans for Immigration Reform, said the explosive growth of immigration as a domestic issue — fueled in part by the Internet — and the formation of activist groups was triggered by the Bush administration's failure to crack down on illegal immigration. ''It is a truly magnificent populist action, in a way we haven't seen in decades," he said.

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I think the main concern these groups have is the rule of law. That is why characterizing them as vigilantes misses the mark by a wide margin. That the groups exist at all shows how potent the feelings are on the issue and how much the "comprehensive" immigration reform crowd has miscalculated. The passion in this debate has swung to the border protection immigration enforcement side.