Minutemen claim success

The controversial group says it has shut down the Arizona border and will now take its anti-immigration campaign to California.

By Rachel Higginbotham
Adelante Staff

On April 18 in Tombstone, Ariz., leaders of the Minuteman Project, an organized group of volunteers patrolling sections of the Arizona-Mexico border for illegal immigrants, announced they would be “reorganizing” due to the “tremendous success” of the project.

“We accomplished our goal of closing down that section of the border” said project spokesman Bill Bennett. As a result, the Minuteman Project will be moving to the interior of California, and the Arizona border project will be supervised by the project's parent operation, Civil Homeland Defense through April “and beyond.”

The project, according to its Web site, www.minutemanproject.com, was organized “to bring national awareness to the decades-long careless disregard for effective U.S. immigration law enforcement.”
Border security was allotted $350,751 for 2005 according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Joe Haslag, associate professor of economics at MU, thinks one factor in particular affects U.S. border patrol. A study he and fellow researchers released in early 2002 examines the economic costs of border patrol. “If the government wants to combat immigration, it needs to take (the coyote market) into consideration,” he said.
The coyote market, as Haslag explained, is the market surrounding the smuggling of undocumented people over the U.S.-Mexican border. “Coyote” is the term used for a person who specializes in taking immigrants across the border.

“A lot of money is spent by coyotes to figure out how border patrol works,” he added, explaining that this could be a reason why border control is at times ineffective.
A coyote's services can cost $1,000 to $1,500 per person, said Belinda Reyes, immigration researcher and associate professor at the University of California-Merced.

Reyes said she didn't think the Minuteman Project was as successful as its organizers claim. Instead of defeating illegal immigration, immigrants may just be avoiding the stretch of land that project volunteers patrol.

“Coyotes are always one step ahead of border patrol,” she said. If they get caught, she explained, “for the most part, people just keep going back to the border in different places. I would be surprised if (the Minuteman Project) actually lead to the decline of illegal immigrants crossing the border.”

Successful or not, the fate of the Minuteman Project is still unknown. Organizers hope to expand patrols to other border states early this fall.