Mr. President, you are wrong!

President Bush is calling the Minuteman Project volunteers "vigilantes" in the latest Washington Times, and promises to call for even looser border controls!

Unthinkable! Absurd! (And there is no other hand ...)

More than 1,000 people — including 30 pilots and their private planes — have volunteered for the Minuteman Project, beginning next month along the Arizona-Mexico border. Civilians will monitor the movement of illegal aliens for the month of April and report them to the Border Patrol.

Mr. Bush said after yesterday's continental summit, with Mexican President Vicente Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin at Baylor University, that he finds such actions unacceptable.

"I'm against vigilantes in the United States of America," Mr. Bush said at a joint press conference. "I'm for enforcing the law in a rational way."

What is that rational way, you might ask. Is it flauting Congressional legislation to add 2,000 new border patrol agents? Apparently so.

Mr. Bush was criticized by both Republicans and Democrats earlier this month for failing to add 2,000 agents to the Border Patrol, as set out in the intelligence overhaul legislation he signed in December.

The president's 2006 budget allows enough money to add only 210 agents for the U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico.

The president changes the subject by talking about North Korean nukes at the news conference. Not to belittle the WMD danger, but our porous borders pose a far greater and immediate danger to our nation. President Bush instead should have been asking -- publicly -- why Vincente Fox's government is encouraging its citizens to illegal migrate to the U.S., not to mention questioning Fox on his stand on "la reconquista".

In general we support Bush but not on this issue. We like Hispanics. We think there's a solid case to be made for legal immigration on sustainable levels with citizenship requirements that will forestall bilingual regionalism. What the president is advocating is unrestrained madness.

He must hear from those of us, a majority we would suspect, who believe that a nation's borders, language and culture are worth preserving and protecting. Our elected reps in Congress also need to hear from us on this.