Back to the Border
A movement was born this summer during the crisis over migrant children at the border. Are the vigilante extremists back for good?
Columbia University expert Donald Green argues that hate crimes tend to spike when rapid in-migration of minority groups occurs in formerly white neighborhoods. Perhaps that helps explain the sheer ugliness of the events in Murrieta, Calif., this July — events that came during the week of Independence Day, when Americans gather to celebrate our country and its democratic values.
Three buses carrying 140 undocumented women and children to a temporary shelter in the city of 107,000 — part of a wave of some 60,000 unaccompanied minor immigrants fleeing staggering violence and poverty in their Central American countries or seeking a long-lost parent in the United States — were met by a howling mob of nativists who physically blocked the vehicles. Ultimately, the government was forced to take the frightened children to another Border Patrol facility, and in the week that followed more angry nativist protesters rallied in Murrieta.