Fascistic Minutemen and Anti-Immigrant Bigotry

Among the more noxious products of the government’s anti-immigrant crusade are the fascistic Minuteman Project and its offshoot, the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. Drawing on support from outright fascists, the Minutemen have a paramilitary component akin to the 1977 Klan Border Watch, the brainchild of white-supremacist David Duke. They conduct armed vigilante patrols of the border with Mexico, serving as auxiliaries to state forces. One of these immigrant-bashers’ current campaigns involves erecting fences along the border to make the case for having it entirely sealed off by walls and barbed wire.

Minuteman spokesmen have also toured various campuses to peddle their racist filth, often under the sponsorship of College Republicans. Various left groups, including the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), have co-sponsored anti-Minutemen protests with college Democratic Party clubs, for example at Columbia University last October. Naturally, these reformist “socialists,” who function as “Anybody but Bush” shills for the Democratic Party, breathed not a word of criticism of their co-sponsors in their coverage of the protest. When the New York University (NYU) College Republicans hosted another Minuteman speaker at an April 9 panel discussion, the reformist left groups protesting outside again steered away from denouncing the Democrats—the other party of American capitalist imperialism.

As a pseudo-militant cover for working in league with the Democrats, the PSL, among others, labels the Minutemen outright fascists. In contrast, we understand that these racist bigots are not, at this time, a fascist organization that advocates or carries out deadly physical assaults on the labor movement and the oppressed. Fascists like the neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan have a long history of speaking with the lynch rope and recruiting to a program of genocide. When such groups have raised their heads in urban centers, as in New York City in October 1999, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee have initiated labor/black mobilizations, centered on the power of the organized working class, to stop their rallies for racist terror. Opposing this perspective, the ISO worked in league with black Democratic Party politician Al Sharpton in an attempt to derail the mobilization of labor/black power in New York.

Though consisting primarily of white racists, the Minutemen have sought to recruit blacks and Latino citizens who buy into anti-immigrant bigotry, with some modest success. A number of Minuteman protests have been supported by Ted Hayes, a black activist for the homeless in Los Angeles, and Anthony Williams, a black preacher in Chicago. The California-based Latino Americans for Immigration Reform has joined with the Minutemen in carrying out patrols along the Mexican border. Minuteman Project co-founder Chris Simcox even hails the late Mexican American icon Cesar Chavez, longtime head of the United Farm Workers Union, as “the original border Minuteman” for his treacherous 1969 march to the border to protest “illegal” immigration. On their Web site, the Minutemen hypocritically distance themselves from neo-Nazis and other “extremists.” But whenever the Minutemen call an action, just such fascist vermin crawl out to join them.

Our position on what action to take against the Minutemen depends on the concrete circumstances. When these racists engage in physical provocations directed at immigrants and their allies, we seek to mobilize workers and minorities to stop them. Last year in the Los Angeles area, a dozen Minuteman and other bigots tried to disrupt a Labor Day march and picnic. Trade unionists and members of immigrant rights groups, joined by our supporters, surrounded these sinister racists, and L.A. cops had to step in to escort them out (see “Racist Minuteman Provocation Spiked,” WV No. 876, 15 September 2006).

But when the Minutemen appear as reactionary ideologues on campuses, we do not support the liberal/reformist position of disrupting their meetings or seeking to drive them off. Rather, as in the case of other right-wing ideologues like David Horowitz, we seek to refute their poisonous anti-immigrant politics through protest and exposure. When members of the ISO and PSL among others took the stage and unfurled banners as Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist spoke at Columbia, his supporters violently attacked the protesters. This gave the Minutemen the pretext to shut down their event and scream that their free speech had been trampled.

A Spartacus Youth Club leaflet issued shortly after the protest noted: “Shutting them down in this context simply played into the hands of the reactionaries’ false and absurd claim that the left is trampling free speech, when in fact it is the right-wing bigots that have been waging a massive campaign to purge the campuses of leftists, immigrants, blacks and any voice that is in opposition to the ruling-class agenda.” The leaflet, reprinted in WV No. 879 (27 October 2006), denounced the investigation launched by the administration against the protesters, stating, “Defend anti-Minutemen protesters! No administration reprisals!” Outrageously, eight of the protesters have now received disciplinary warnings or censures from the Columbia administration.

An ISO speaker at the rally outside the Columbia event stated that the Minutemen “don’t have a right to free speech because it’s not free speech, it’s hate speech.” At bottom, this is a liberal call to suppress racist ideology, which leads logically to appeals to the campus administration and/or the bourgeois state to regulate what people can and cannot say. Thus following a grotesque College Republican “Find the Illegal Immigrant” event at NYU this February, the College Democrats and LUCHA (Latinos Unidos Con Honor y Amistad) called on the administration to revoke the College Republicans’ charter. Calls on the administration to regulate speech will necessarily and overwhelmingly redound against the left and defenders of the rights of the oppressed. While the reformist left pushes fealty to the Democratic Party of racism and war, our perspective is to defend immigrant rights through mobilizing working-class power against the racist capitalist system.