Mediaboss Marketing

The Minuteman Project, which had civilians guard the border, has all but disappeared. But it stoked a movement that continues to influence the immigration reform debate.

In just a few years, perhaps the most visible civilian attempt to stop illegal immigration has all but disappeared amid the changing dynamics of the debate.

Subscribe Today to the Monitor

Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS of The Christian Science Monitor Weekly Digital Edition

A little less than a decade ago, the Minuteman Project and the copycats it spawned arrived at the Arizona border with binoculars and American flags, vowing to defend the country from what they described as an invasion. At their height, the Minutemen were the face of a conservative insurgency that would later lend its energy to the emergence of the tea party.

To like-minded Americans, they were patriots. To critics, they were dangerous vigilantes.

Today, however, they have largely vanished. The recession took its toll, it seems, making an expensive enterprise impractical for workaday crusaders. So did infighting within the groups, as well as shifts in immigration patterns.

But the Minutemen were also victims of their own success, helping to forge a strident new movement against illegal immigration that continues to shape the political debate today. In a very real way, the Minuteman Project has lost momentum because politicians in state capitols and Congress have taken the lead. While several states from Arizona to Alabama have passed strong anti-illegal immigration laws, Republicans in the US House of Representatives have blocked comprehensive immigration reform legislation.

"The energy passed from the so-called citizen border patrol groups to state legislatures," says Mark Potok, an expert on militias and antigovernment groups at the Southern Law Poverty Center, in Birmingham, Ala.

In 2010, the center documented 319 groups active in Arizona and other parts of the Southwest border that, often armed, confronted people suspected of being in the country illegally. By 2013, the number had dwindled to 33.

View original post here:
What happened to Minuteman Project? It's still roiling immigration reform.