He didn’t ask for a souvenir, but the Mexican man had no choice.

While he was illegally crossing the Mexico-United States border, three Americans physically restrained the man and forced him to hold a shirt which read ‘Bryan Barton caught an illegal alien and all I got was this T-shirt,’ he told authorities, according to The Guardian newspaper of the United Kingdom.

Barton was one of the Americans who participated in The Minutemen Project, an Arizona-based effort where Americans volunteer to ‘patrol’ 23 miles of the Mexican-United States border to deter Mexicans from passing through. According to the organization’s Web site, the project addresses ‘decades-long careless disregard of effective U.S. immigration law enforcement.’

On its Web site, the Minutemen claim ‘mobs of illegal aliens … endlessly stream across U.S. borders.’ According to them, if attention isn’t paid to this issue, ‘future generations will inherit a tangle of rancorous, unassimilated, squabbling cultures with no common bond to hold them together’ and America will no longer be ‘a harmonious melting pot.’

The Minutemen fear a cultural and economic breakdown if illegal immigration continues. America’s felt this fear before, whenever waves of immigrants-German, Irish or Chinese-have poured into America. U.S. citizens object, forgetting their families were once immigrants. They forget their own dusty stories of escape from persecution, famine or war to find freedom in America. But after each wave, American culture was enhanced, not weakened. The Mexicans, like all immigrants, will add to the melting pot. The Minutemen’s fears simply reflect their xenophobic desire to keep out those people they view as dangerous, lazy and different.

To their credit, the Minutemen have succeeded in raising attention to immigration law. But Americans concerned with immigration should petition, protest or write to government officials to pass laws to make naturalization more efficient, so immigrants do not live and work illegally. Or they could push for immigrant quotas. Or they could support or protest Bush’s temporary work program.

But intimidation and mocking, the Minutemen’s main tactics, belittle and disrespect these Mexican people who, for whatever reason, feel desperate or unhappy enough to make the extremely difficult journey from their homes to establish themselves here. Perhaps that man will someday receive a better souvenir: a t-shirt which reads, ‘Proud To Be An American.’

JEAN STEVENS IS A JUNIOR MAGAZINE, WOMEN’S STUDIES AND POLITICAL SCIENCE MAJOR. E-MAIL HER AT JMSTEV03@SYR.EDU.

Published on April 10, 2005 at 12:00 pm