1. You have no idea how many people at these protests are not "legal citizens" (I'm honestly not sure what you mean by that term - I don't mean to bring out Semantics Officer MBJ but on one hand I can't imagine you intend it literally and on the other you've made a fool of me and others before for giving you the benefit of doubt in some of your other questionable expressions.

2. What does the immigration status (again, whatever it is you mean by "legal citizen") of some of the participants of a protest have to do with the viability of the protest itself? Would you feel differently about the civil rights marches of the 1960s if you learned that some significant number of the participants were not "legal citizens"?

Operation Wetback was a repatriation project of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service to remove illegal Mexican immigrants ("wetbacks") from the Southwest.

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The resulting Operation Wetback, a national reaction against illegal immigration, began in Texas in mid-July 1954. Headed by the commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization Service, Gen. Joseph May Swing, the United States Border Patrol aided by municipal, county, state, and federal authorities, as well as the military, began a quasimilitary operation of search and seizure of all illegal immigrants. Fanning out from the lower Rio Grande valley, Operation Wetback moved northward. Illegal aliens were repatriated initially through Presidio because the Mexican city across the border, Ojinaga, had rail connections to the interior of Mexico by which workers could be quickly moved on to Durango. A major concern of the operation was to discourage reentry by moving the workers far into the interior. Others were to be sent through El Paso. On July 15, the first day of the operation, 4,800 aliens were apprehended. Thereafter the daily totals dwindled to an average of about 1,100 a day. The forces used by the government were actually relatively small, perhaps no more than 700 men, but were exaggerated by border patrol officials who hoped to scare illegal workers into flight back to Mexico. Valley newspapers also exaggerated the size of the government forces for their own purposes: generally unfavorable editorials attacked the Border Patrol as an invading army seeking to deprive Valley farmers of their inexpensive labor force. While the numbers of deportees remained relatively high, the illegals were transported across the border on trucks and buses. As the pace of the operation slowed, deportation by sea began on the Emancipation, which ferried wetbacks from Port Isabel, Texas, to Veracruz, and on other ships. Ships were a preferred mode of transport because they carried the illegal workers farther away from the border than did buses, trucks, or trains. The boat lift continued until the drowning of seven deportees who jumped ship from the Mercurio provoked a mutiny and led to a public outcry against the practice in Mexico. Other aliens, particularly those apprehended in the Midwest states, were flown to Brownsville and sent into Mexico from there. The operation trailed off in the fall of 1954 as INS funding began to run out.

It is difficult to estimate the number of illegal aliens forced to leave by the operation. The INS claimed as many as 1,300,000, though the number officially apprehended did not come anywhere near this total. The INS estimate rested on the claim that most aliens, fearing apprehension by the government, had voluntarily repatriated themselves before and during the operation. The San Antonio district, which included all of Texas outside of El Paso and the Trans-Pecos,qv had officially apprehended slightly more than 80,000 aliens, and local INS officials claimed that an additional 500,000 to 700,000 had fled to Mexico before the campaign began. Many commentators have considered these figure to be exaggerated.

Various groups opposed any form of temporary labor in the United States. The American G.I. Forum, for instance, by and large had little or no sympathy for the man who crossed the border illegally. Apparently the Texas State Federation of Labor supported the G.I. Forum's position. Eventually the two organizations coproduced a study entitled What Price Wetbacks?, which concluded that illegal aliens in United States agriculture damaged the health of the American people, that illegals displaced American workers, that they harmed the retailers of McAllen, and that the open-border policy of the American government posed a threat to the security of the United States. Critics of Operation Wetback considered it xenophobic and heartless.

If Arnold Schwarzenegger had migrated to Mexico instead of the United States, he couldn't be a governor. If Argentina native Sergio Villanueva, firefighter hero of the Sept. 11 attacks, had moved to Tecate instead of New York, he wouldn't have been allowed on the force.

Even as Mexico presses the United States to grant unrestricted citizenship to millions of undocumented Mexican migrants, its officials at times calling U.S. policies "xenophobic," Mexico places daunting limitations on anyone born outside its territory.

"Today we are here to say, immigrant rights are human rights," said Michael Ramos, director of social justice ministries for the Church Council of Greater Seattle. He is working with more than 15 local congregations to revive the sanctuary movement to house or otherwise support people in danger of being deported.