Until recently, the parched, dusty town of Tombstone, Arizona, was best known for the brief but savage mayhem portrayed in the classic 1957 Western Gunfight at the OK Corral.
But these days, visitors to Tombstone are not much interested in its tacky tourist attractions like "Helldorado" or plastic figures of heroic sheriff Wyatt Earp, who is credited with bringing law and order to the Wild West.
Tombstone is now the site of a new showdown -- between thousands of undocumented immigrants and hundreds of volunteer Americans from all walks of life who have gathered there to patrol the border with Mexico for a month.
Suddenly, the Sonoran Desert backwater has become a flashpoint for one of the most complicated issues facing America and many other Western countries where economic and social opportunities are attracting an unrelenting tide of undocumented newcomers.
Activists on both sides acknowledged that there are no easy answers. With dwindling populations unwilling to perform many menial tasks for low wages, industrialized countries need immigrants from poorer countries, who have become a vital part of their labor forces.
In the US, the population of illegal immigrants surged to more than 10 million last year, according to a new study from the Pew Hispanic Center. These undocumented workers represented about one-third of the foreign-born population in the US. Nearly 6 million of them are from Mexico.
Last year, authorities arrested about 1.2 million Mexicans trying to cross the border without permits. About half of those arrests came in the 60km stretch of the 2,000km US-Mexico border around Tombstone known as the San Pedro River Valley.
That's why hundreds of the controversial volunteers have now converged there. Calling themselves the Minutemen, after the militia that helped repel the British during the American Revolution, many are armed with shotguns and pistols and are equipped with night-vision goggles, coolers of beer and lounge chairs that they set up beginning this past week at lookout points over some of the most popular smuggling routes.
Most of the time, there is little to do but drink the beer and complain about how immigrants are ruining the country.
"They're costing us billions [of dollars] in health care," said Ted, a stout 64-year-old contractor who was wearing a cowboy hat and had a shotgun propped up against his lawn chair "just in case."
"I'm not racist, but the situation can't go on," added Chip Johnson, who had made the trip to the border from Utah. "We need order at the border."
The immigrants themselves were few and far between. Reports from Mexico said smugglers who are paid an average of US$1,500 dollars per head to sneak people across the border are steering clear of San Pedro and using other routes.
The Minutemen are under strict orders not to use violence and not even to approach anyone they believe to be an "illegal," as they call the immigrants. They are to simply alert the Border Patrol. So far, no violence has been reported, but there have also been few apprehensions.
Nevertheless, the Minutemen claimed that merely by focusing attention on the problem, their mobilization had succeeded. They even claimed credit for a government decision to position 500 new agents on the Arizona border.
"We know we are not a panacea, that we are not going to change all this in 30 days," says Minuteman founder James Gilchrist, "but we have already accomplished our goal 100-fold by getting the media out here and getting out the message."
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