Latinos Equal Terrorists?

I was just listening to Latino USA on NPR and they were talking about the recent immigrant reform bills floating around Congress and anti-immigrant groups like the Minute Men.

It was reported that the Minute Men (What? No women?) claimed that over 40,000 Americans have been killed by "illegal" immigrants. I went to their website to check it out and sure enough I found this:

“Since 9/11 alone, about 45,000 U.S. residents have been killed in action via homicide or manslaughter at the hands of illegal aliens, and about another quarter of a million to 300,000 have been wounded,” Gilchrist told Cybercast News Service in an interview.

Gilchrist said he used the terms “killed in action” and “wounded” intentionally “because essentially, we have a war going on here that’s not a declared war, that’s not a conventional war, but it is costing us 9,000 lives a year.”

I haven't seen any real statistical data on this but to equate undocumented immigration with war and combat is pretty mind boggling.

In the report it was also stated that the Minute Men claim that our "open" boarders are paving the way for terrorists. But a interviewee on the program said that between 2002 (or 2004, memory hazy, will update soon though) and 2006 around 8,000 undocumented immigrants were detained by the U.S. and out of those 8,000 only 12-15 were suspected of having slight and remote ties with terrorism (terrorism in the broad sense I'm sure). So that's basically .18%. Hmmm...Some crazy and real threat we have there. Anyways.

When looking critically at issues such as immigration one has to look behind the rhetoric and use history as a guide to see how much of these fears are real and legit and how much stems from racism and the fear of people of color and non-English speakers. In my opinion (more on this latter) this is the true driving factor behind such insane rhetoric from anti-immigrant groups such as the Minute Men (see "Anti-Immigration Groups Cross Breeding With Hate Groups")