Another flareup on the immigration controversy

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Mexican immmigration to the United States, whether by legal or illegal means, is an extremely passionate issue these days on both sides of the border.

Mexican newspapers have been reporting on the MacArthur Park melee that broke out when L.A. police officers clashed with pro-immigration marchers on May Day.

But if Los Angeles hadn’t been grabbing most of the immigration-related headlines this week, an even more potentially inflammatory story out of Alabama might have gotten more attention in Mexico. As this story describes, a judge this week denied bond to five men belonging to a militia who allegedly were plotting a machine-gun attack on Mexicans. A federal agent testified that the five members of the so-called Alabama Free Militia were planning to attack Mexicans in Remlap, a town north of Birmingham.

According to the story, the men had been stockpiling weapons including 130 homemade hand grenades, a machine gun and 2,500 rounds of ammunition. A lawyer for one of the men said the incident was being overblown, and that his client had been stockpiling weapons ‘partly because of the scare of the Y2K computer glitch in 2000.’

Whatever the outcome of this affair, La Plaza predicts it will confirm many Mexican politicians, pundits and ordinary citizens in their belief, justified or not, that blame for the current immigration standoff lies primarily in the attitudes of people living north of the Rio Grande.

Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City