"This legislation is aimed at preventing another 9/11 style attack," said James Sensenbrenner (R-IL), Chair of the House Judiciary Committee and author of the Real ID Act.

That was how Republican sponsors of the bill in the House of Representatives justified connecting it to the $82 billion war supplemental request for the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. By connecting the Act to the supplemental request, House Republicans have virtually assured its passage, even though the Senate never held a single hearing on the controversial immigration measure. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, who opposes the measure, told reporters last week that his party would not use a filibuster to stop it because it's connected to what is seen as money for the troops.

But most of the provisions in the Act, if not all, would not have stopped the nineteen 9/11 hijackers. In fact, the most ardent supporters of the Act have been promoting similar measures of closing the border and using aggressive law enforcement to enact immigration laws long before 9/11. The goal of these measures back then was not to stop a terrorist attack, but to stop Mexicans, and others from Latin America, from entering the country.

"We want attention brought to the poorest borders because of the consequences of what I call the Trojan Horse Invasion primarily from Mexico," said James Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project, who with Minutemen supporters and other anti-immigration activists flooded Capitol Hill last week to pressure lawmakers to keep the Real ID Act in the supplemental war request.

"Maybe Arizona, California and Nevada will become all Hispanic and they would literally break off from the United States socially and politically and possibly through a blood war in another 40 years," Gilchrist said.

In 1996 Congress required that a 14 mile long border fence be constructed starting in the Pacific Ocean and going inland through San Diego. But construction was halted because of the environmental damage it would cause to the Tijuana Estuary. But, not to worry, the Real ID Act will take care of that "hiccup" by authorizing the Homeland Security Department to waive all environmental and labor laws in order to complete construction of the border fence. In other words, construction of the fence will be immune to all lawsuits, besides, that is, a potential constitutional challenge.

When the House first attached the Real ID Act to the supplemental request for Iraq and Afghanistan, it seemed doubtful that the Senate would go along with it. Last month Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) indicated he did not want it as a part of the war funding.

Supporters of the Real ID Act credit the presence of the Minutemen and their supporters in Washington DC last week with changing that.

"I think they had an enormous impact," said Dan Stein, the President of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. "There's no question that the relentless national media attention from CNN, FOX News and radio talk show hosts around the country galvanized this populous movement."

The Federation for American Immigration Reform, also known as FAIR, joined the Minutemen and about 18 right wing radio talk show hosts for a week long conference in Washington DC called "Keep Their Feet to the Fire." With its venue at the Holiday Inn just three blocks from the Capitol, its advocates were common visitors in lawmakers offices all week long.

But what their conference demonstrated was that while they may have a sincere concern of a "terrorist" crossing the border, the bigger issue is one of demographics. Many of the conference attendees consider Mexico an enemy state that is sending its people over the border to reclaim the south west.

While such sentiments may be dismissed as right wing radical nonsense, their message is now being echoed by some Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Many of them are the same ones forcing the Real ID Act through Congress.

"This cult of multiculturalism is designed to tear us apart as a nation," said Representative Tom Tancredo (R-CO) who gave the keynote address at the conference dinner. "Multiculturalism is forcing us to look at ourselves and dislike everything we see. It teaches our children to be unaccepting of anything good from western civilization."

Attendees of the conference often said they are not against legal immigration, and they commonly spoke favorably of immigrants from the past, mostly from Europe, who they said came to embrace what America stood for. But they don't hold the same view of today's immigrants who come from Latin America.

"We don't see that with non assimilated illegal immigrants today," said Gilchrist, founder of the Minutemen Project. "They come here to conduct their criminal activity because they haven't been caught and deported or because they come here to plunder the system."

What is clear, at least from the grass roots level of the anti-immigration movement, is that their real concern is that an influx of undocumented immigrants, particularly from Latin America, is bringing a demographic shift that will no longer allow the Euro-American culture and values to remain the dominant culture of the country.

"They don't share our values, they try to bring their culture with them," said Evelyn Miller, a retired school teacher who came from Los Angeles to attend the conference and to lobby lawmakers. "Our country was founded on individual rights. But now these groups claim group rights: Hispanic rights, Asian rights, south Pacific Islander rights, and that is very different culturally from how we were established."

"They definitely see it as a matter of preserving white culture," said Reverend David Ostendorf, president of the Center for New Community, a religious base organization in Chicago that tracks the activities of groups like the Minutemen and FAIR. "They want to make sure that white power, the dominant power in society today, is maintained. And that is the driving force in everything they do in terms of trying to close the border and reduce immigration."

A report released last November by the Center for New Community tries to connect FAIR to what it refers to as white supremacist groups. While many of FAIR's statements on illegal immigration usually refer to its effects on employment and the economy, the Center's report claims that FAIR has close connections and works in collaboration with such groups as the American Immigration Control Foundation and Voices of Citizens Together, both which the report claims promotes white nationalism.

"If they want to have a discussion on cultural cohesion and whether we want a national language, lets have a discussion about it," responded Dan Stein, President of FAIR. "The name calling is designed to intimidate people. It doesn't intimidate us. It intimidates the elite who are scared to talk about the issue."

Mitch Jeserich is the Capitol Hill Correspondent for Free Speech Radio News.

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