The Times reports on the Minuteman Project, a group of armed vigilantes patrolling la frontera for kicks in an attempt to make migrant's lives that much harder.

"I hope to go out on patrols at night, find some illegals,"
said Mr. McCarty, who had his .38-caliber pistol strapped to his leg as he stood
outside the citizen patrol's makeshift headquarters here in Tombstone, the town
where Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday engaged in a shootout with the Clanton gang in
1881. "I need some excitement. And this is better than sitting at home all day
watching rattlesnakes crawl out of the den."

You'd think you'd figure out that you were doing something wrong when Aryan Nation websites started singing your praises.

The citizen volunteers say they will track and report smugglers to
the Border Patrol. They say they are not vigilantes and will try to enforce a
strict "no contact" rule in approaching Mexicans.

And they need the rifles why?

"You move out here to your 40 acres of Shangri-La," he said, "look
out the window, and what to do you see? Hordes of illegals running from the
bushes."
He has called for deployment of National Guard troops along the
1,950-mile border.

This is a rhetoric of extermination, grounded in a deeply racialized sense of entitlement. The reference to "40 acres" is particularly fascinating given the historical resonances of that phrase. (Wilcox is white.) Besides the demonization of undocumented immigrants as terrorists, an increasingly common tactic since September 11, as the right has attempted to use the deaths of undocumented immigrants like those who washed dishes at Windows on The World to foment hate campaigns against people in the very same situation, there's a sense here that migrants' presence is intolerable because of the visible disruption to the national discourse of racial ownership, the myths we tell ourselves about the West and Europeans' right to it, and, again a deeply racialized understanding of who belongs where.

Hundreds of people died trying to cross the desert last year. Maybe this year, dedicated activists like Chris Wilcox will make that thousands.

"I'm restless," Mr. McCarty said, leaning against an adobe fence in the midday
sun. "I needed something to do before I drove my wife crazy."