The Corner at the National Review Online reports that at a Republican luncheon yesterday White House adviser Karl Rove was overheard explaining the Bush amnesty immigration plan by saying, "I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas."

Excepts from "The Corner" article below:

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There should be no need to explain why this is an obscene statement coming from a leader in the party that promotes the virtues of hard work, thrift, and sobriety, a party whose demi-god actually split fence rails as a young man, a party where "respectable Republican cloth coat" once actually meant something. But it does seem to be necessary to explain.

Rove's comment illustrates how the Bush-McCain-Giuliani-Hagel-Martinez-Brownback-Huckabee approach to immigration strikes at the very heart of self-government. It is precisely Rove's son (and my own, and those of the rest of us in the educated elite) who should work picking tomatoes or making beds, or washing restaurant dishes, or mowing lawns, especially when they're young, to help them develop some of the personal and civic virtues needed for self-government. It's not that I want my kids to make careers of picking tomatoes; Mexican farmworkers don't want that either. But we must inculcate in our children, especially those likely to go on to high-paying occupations, that there is no such thing as work that is beneath them.

The Wilton League of Women Voters and the Wilton Library are once again combining forces to offer a program on a “hot issue.” The topic this time is Immigration. On Wednesday, Feb. 7, at 7:30 p.m., in the Brubeck Room of the Wilton Library. Two outspoken advocates for immigration reform, Michael Boyle and Mark Boughton, will debate this important issue.

Michael Boyle is an immigration attorney from North Haven and Danbury. He is president of the Connecticut Immigration Attorneys Association and speaks frequently on the legal problems faced by immigrants. His private practice deals with green cards, citizenship, human rights, deportation defense and other immigration issues, some in high-profile cases.

Mark Boughton is the mayor of Danbury, with first-hand experience with an expanding immigrant population. He argues for stronger federal enforcement of immigration law and deputization of state police officers as immigration officers. Illegal immigrants, he says, have strained Danbury’s housing and overloaded city services: fire, police, hospital.

It is likely that a large number of people will attend, as this event has attracted wide attention outside Wilton. Those who have pre-registered will be guaranteed space in the Brubeck Room of the Library, provided they arrive by 7:30 PM. Once the Brubeck Room is filled to its permitted capacity, additional audience members will be seated in the Library gallery where they will be able to hear the discussion.

There will be one speaker, Michael Boyle, an immigration attorney with offices in North Haven and Danbury. Mr. Boyle will talk about the legal issues involved in immigration and share his experiences and insights in this field. Following his presentation, the public will have an opportunity to ask questions or to express an opinion. Mayor Mark Boughton, a previously announced participant, has withdrawn.

For months, Jim Gilchrist promised that his Minuteman Project would peacefully observe the Arizona border as a protest against illegal immigration. Volunteers — he said there would be 1,300 of them — would be carefully screened, with FBI help, to keep out white supremacists and racists. No one would be allowed to bear guns except those who had permits to carry concealed weapons.

Gilchrist said that critics who called his group "vigilantes" — naysayers who included President Bush — were absolutely wrong about his volunteers.

Indeed, Gilchrist told USA Today, these men and women sought only to bring attention to a major social problem. Most were "white Martin Luther Kings."

Maybe so. But Gilchrist's accuracy has been less than sterling.

As the month-long April project started, some 300 volunteers showed up — a thousand fewer than predicted. An FBI official denied that the agency was screening Gilchrist's or any other private group's members. At least four-fifths of volunteers did carry weapons, and almost none were checked for permits. Racist talk abounded. And at least some neo-Nazis and other racists did join in Gilchrist's project.

On April 2, as the month-long effort got under way, the Minuteman Project held a protest across the street from the U.S. Border Patrol headquarters in Naco, Ariz. Prominent among the demonstrators were two men who confided that they were members of the Phoenix chapter of the National Alliance — the largest neo-Nazi group in America. One of the two, who sat in lawn chairs throughout, held a sign with arrows depicting invading armies of people from Mexico — a sign identical to National Alliance billboards and pamphlets, except without the Alliance logo.

The presence of Alliance members was not much of a surprise, and there were likely more than that pair. "We're not going to show up as a group and say, 'Hi, we're the National Alliance," Alliance official Shaun Walker told a reporter in the run-up to the protest. "But we have members ... that will participate."

In fact, National Alliance pamphlets were distributed in Tombstone and this predominantly Hispanic community just two days before the Minuteman Project got going. "Non-Whites are turning America into a Third World slum," they read. "They come for welfare or to take our jobs. Let's send them home now."

Many other white supremacists had promised to attend, including members of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations, but it was difficult to know if they showed up.

One well-known extremist did appear. Armored in a flak jacket and packing a .38-caliber snub-nosed revolver, Joe McCutchen joined other volunteers patrolling the barbed wire fence separating the United States and Mexico near Bisbee, Ariz.

McCutchen is the recently appointed chairman of Protect Arkansas Now, a group seeking to pass legislation that would deny public benefits to undocumented workers in that state. More to the point, he was identified by the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens as a member in 2001 — a charge he denies, though he admits that he did give a speech that year to the group that has described blacks as "a retrograde species of humanity." As recently as summer 2003, McCutchen wrote anti-Semitic letters to his hometown newspaper in Fort Smith, Ark.

[...]

Back in March, Gilchrist had also warned that he had been told that leaders of an extremely violent gang made up of Salvadorans — the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13 — had ordered its members to teach "a lesson" to the Minuteman volunteers. As it turned out, however, no frightening, brown-skinned gangsters showed up.

But the National Alliance was certainly there.

The first clip is from a appearance Gilchrist did on Fox News Hannity and Colmes where he defended white supremacists groups. (via Media Matters)
Here's a partial transcript:

COLMES: Recently, the white supremacy group Aryan Nation has recruited for the Minuteman Project, promoting the protest as a white pride event. This is who you're participating with here.

GILCHRIST: I have -- Alan, I have no control over someone posting an e-mail. I know what you're talking about. I've been to that Stormfront website. I have put a warning on our website -- you are not welcome here if you're a member of any supremacist group, whether it be of any color, race or creed.

Alan, there are supremacist groups out there of all races, colors and creeds. It's not just white supremacists. Why are you picking on them? There are brown. There are purple. There are red.

Amazing.

Now, I'll offer this video for the cherry on top. Not long ago, Gilchrist made an appearance at Columbia University which caused a huge counter protest by students who stormed the stage and held banners against the Minutemen.

Now, here's where Gilchrist and his defenders tried to lie to the public.

Gilchrist tired to make it seem like HE was being attacked by the students when in fact it was his Minutemen goons who attacked the students with one of Gilchrist's goons kicking a student in the head.

Well, Gilchrist came on Democracy NOW and tried to debate the head organizer of the counter student protest at Columbia and he suddenly cut the interview short when challenged about the incident and his ties to the National Alliance.

Watch the video and see the coward in action.

The flags came out in the last few moments of the protest. The commies were chanting "Nazis Go Home" for hours on end non-stop, so I and everyone present on the street in the hot sun, facing hostile commies, browns, and who-knows-what greenlighted the flag idea. We will stand behind our decision.

If anyone wants to do it differently, come with us and tell us then and there.

Besides, this is America and if they can fly their commie flags, burn the US flag, fly their brown flag, we can fly anything we want.

Well, I've been saying all along that the Minutemen's core demographic is constituted of right-wing extremists, including many outright racists.

At a recent anti-immigrant rally in Laguna Beach, the connection was made explicit.

The rally was held July 30. It apparently was a follow-up of sorts to a similar rally held in the same locale on July 16, in which a local anti-immigration activist decided to protest a local arts festival's financial support for a day labor center for undocument workers. This rally drew the participation of the Save Our State campaign (an ostensibly mainstream anti-immigration organization) and the Minutemen's Jim Gilchrist. It also drew a contingent of neo-Nazis.

[...]

What's going on, of course, is that the Minutemen provide an ideal opportunity for white racists to "mainstream" their agenda, using the relatively benign "average citizens" that Lou Dobbs exclusively observes in their ranks as just so much cover. An online report from the July 16 rally discusses this in some detail:

By OCAngel's accounts, the rally she worked hard putting together was indeed a smashing success. More than sixty people showed up, while only five counterdemonstrators appeared to oppose them. Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist, an Aliso Viejo resident, dropped by for awhile to pay his respects. Barbara Coe, the venerable Chairwoman of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform (CCIR) and co-author of Proposition 187, was also there. And Don Silva (aka "OldPreach"), one of Joe Turner's close allies, was running around dressed in camouflage again, waving around an American flag (for matter of record, the rally itself was not officially endorsed by S.O.S.). {3}

But members of the National Alliance, an avowedly white supremacist organization, appeared to be out in full force that day. In fact, somebody who calls herself occutegirl, perhaps unbeknownst to her at the time, posted a photograph she took of two reputed members of that group on the "Save Our State" website. The photo shows a young woman (alleged to be "dixieland_delight" on the Stormfront White Nationalist Community website) and a man suspected of being her boyfriend holding up a blue banner reading, "DEPORT ILLEGAL ALIENS," with the words, "http://www.SaveOurState.org," emblazoned just underneath them in much smaller type. {4}

After realizing that a good number of "white nationalists" had attended her rally, OCAngel, to her credit, took some steps to distance herself from them. In one cryptic posting on the "Save Our State" website, she hinted publicly to a person who apparently had sent her a private message that they had "an agenda I do not agree with" and would "have preferred your group [possibly the National Alliance] to set up further and separate from us [on Saturday, July 16th], and not aligned yourselves with us in any way. I appreciated that you did not openly flaunt your views ..." {5}

But the truth is, despite OCAngel's apparent despair over all the National Alliance members who showed up to her Laguna Beach rally, evidence is rapidly mounting that white supremacists from across Southern California are trying to work hand and glove with "Save Our State" and its members in every protest and demonstration they organize; in fact, in some circumstances, it appears some white supremacists are active members of that group.

None of this should be terribly surprising. I've long held that immigration reform is an important issue that requires serious discussion, but I don't believe for a moment that scapegoating and harassing border crossers is going to provide any solutions. My experience has been that if you scratch beneath the surface of those who do, you quickly find that they are more likely to be concerned with Latino (or any nonwhite) immigration, not illegal immigration per se, though of course they pay lip service to the latter.

While immigrant raids occur statewide, Danbury has been a particular hotspot. Last September, 11 undocumented workers were arrested in a sting operation. They were picked up by law enforcement officials posing as building contractors, then processed by federal police and detained to Texas. Nine were released on bail, and the others are reportedly being deported to Ecuador.

The experience of the group, nicknamed the Danbury 11, is becoming more and more common across the country, immigrant rights supporters say.

“They have been carrying out a coordinated campaign to terrorize the immigrant communities from California to Connecticut,” said Jason McGahan of Connecticut Regional Coalition for Immigrant Rights.

On Feb. 3, at 7:30 p.m. Saint Augustine’s church in Hartford hosts Stop the Raids forum. The event, organized by the CT Regional Coalition for Immigrant Rights, features presentations from attorneys, immigrants and others.

“It’s not only about the Danbury 11. It’s about the raids that are happening nationally. We want to bring awareness about these things to everybody in the community, not just in Danbury, but everywhere,” said Marela Zacarias, an organizer of the event and a member of Latinos Against the War.

The organizers of the event intend for both immigrants and non immigrants to attend.

“The reality is that this happens all around us,” said St. Augustine’s pastor Father Thomas Mitchell. Mitchell said the parish has consistently supported immigrant rights, and agreed to host the forum without hesitation.

[...]

The September sting and Pereira’s arrest were conducted by the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration policing branch, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Founded in 2003, ICE has netted thousands of immigrants during home and workplace raids conducted in California, North Carolina and other states during January 2007. Immigrant rights supporters decry their tactics.

“When ICE arrests an immigrant, they essentially go by the same procedure that would be called ‘disappearing someone’ in Latin America,” McGahan said. “They grab them very suddenly, take them to a location that they do not disclose to the family. [They] have been known to transfer the detainees to locations far removed from the arrest location.”

[...]

Yale law student Simon Moshenberg is representing nine of the men in a lawsuit with the Department of Homeland Security. Working with other Yale students through the Jerome Frank Legal Services Organization, Moshenberg hopes to prove that the original arrest was conducted illegally.

“Among the many arguments we’re going to make is that the arrest itself was carried out in an illegal manner, and therefore, as is standard practice, if the arrest is illegal, all the evidence gained as a result of that arrest has to be thrown out and can’t be used in a legal proceeding,” Moshenberg said.

Moshenberg and his fellow Yale students are defending the men pro bono; many immigrants going through deportation hearings do so without legal council.