Springtime on the Border

The warm, breezy summit of Coronado Peak, in Southeast Arizona's Huachuca Mountains, offers a fine view of the seemingly endless arid grassland below, a high desert plain of brown earth accented by a fertile strip of green willow and ringed by gentle mountain ranges. A faint dirt road slicing the plain marks the division between the United States and Mexico. Francisco Vasquez de Coronado once ambled exhausted through this rugged terrain with a legion of soldiers, Indians and priests on a "missionary undertaking" seeking the fabled "Seven Cities of Gold" to the north.

Every day, more than 450 years after that historic expedition, the scene continues unabated. Under the hot daytime sun and the dark cloak of night, quiet squadrons of drug runners march right through the meager barbed wire cattle fence marking the U.S.-Mexico border, and through the Huachucas, to supply addicts as far as New York. Indians from the Central American highlands trudge for days up dry washes lined with bramble bushes, some told that the ocean lies only a day's walk ahead. Church groups supply water to these migrants, hoping to stem the deaths that claim more than a hundred lives annually. And Mexicans, finding no trace of gold in their homeland, flow illegally north seeking the fabled 7-Eleven, or just about any job that will pay.

Cochise County, AZ is evidence of how illegal immigration is crippling the United States at the very same time it seems to benefit. The intense enforcement effort concentrated on the California and Texas borders has shifted migrant flow into Arizona, and the Tucson sector has bore the brunt of that redirected stream. In 2004, approximately 350,000 migrants were caught along the Arizona border, almost half of these apprehensions occurring within this county. This status sits uneasily with locals here. In the wake of streaming migrants and smugglers comes littered belongings, damaged property, strained social services, an enforcement presence and a violent edge. It's a reality that local resident May Kolbe calls "living in a war zone."

In a way, it's always been like this. Cochise County is steeped in a rich "Wild West" history of lawlessness. It's the land of Wyatt Earp and Geronimo, gunfights at Tombstone's OK Corral, copper mines, Army forts, Indian wars, cowboys, cattle rustlers and gamblers.

A Call to Arms

Situated blissfully in the middle of the valley, a mere two miles from the border fence is the Miracle Valley Bible College, where the Minuteman Project has set up its headquarters.

Hundreds of volunteers from across the nation heeded a call put out over the internet by a loosely organized coalition of immigration activists to join a grassroots gathering that would spend the month of April here, patrolling a 23-mile stretch along the nation's most penetrated section of border. The volunteers, calling themselves the Minutemen-- after the Massachusetts colony militia who were the first to arrive at a battlefield -- were retired military, teachers, and construction workers who brought a modest air force, communications equipment, guns, lawn chairs and sunscreen to perform "the job the government won't do."

Not easy to typecast, the volunteers who descended on the desert represented a spectrum of backgrounds and views -- moderate to extreme -- but united by a core sentiment. They're indignant at an illegal invasion that sees immigrants, drug smugglers and possible terrorists streaming across a porous and undefended border, unchecked, by the thousands. Many are "Pat Buchanan Republicans" who feel "Bushwacked" by a president who looks the other way to the problem while lining his political pockets with the support of employers who profit off the exploitation of cheap labor. They see a corrupt, Mexican government flagrantly assisting the illegal flow, washing its hands free of impoverishment while collecting remittances from migrant workers who send back their wages in amounts that have now surpassed domestic oil revenues. And they arrived out of concern for the changes in their communities, the violence they feel is a byproduct of impoverished immigrants seeking economic opportunism and the demographic changes they view as threatening the American way of life.