Chris Simcox wants to make one thing clear.

He’s not a racist.

“It’s good for immigrants to secure the border,” said the president and founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, a group that pushes for tougher border controls. “How dare you call me a xenophobe … when we’re trying to protect legal immigrants?”

Simcox spoke Thursday night in the Junkins building to a group of students, several of whom belonged to the Young Conservatives of Texas.

The activist explained his organization’s history and purpose and tried to correct misperceptions about the Defense Corps.

“We don’t take law enforcement into our own hands,” said Simcox. Rather, the group sends out rescue teams and works to lobby politicians at the federal, state and local levels.

The Defense Corps has 81 chapters in 36 states.

“We’re like a big neighborhood watch group,” said Simcox.

“The groups fighting each other [about immigration] don’t pay attention to the opponent who caused the problem in the first place – the federal government,” he said. “Politicians are sitting back gleefully in their ivory towers in D.C. making beaucoup money.”

Simcox also urged the American public to hold its elected officials accountable.

“We have to hold them accountable in between watching the Dodgers and ‘American Idol,'” he added.

The current problems with immigration are unlike those of generations past, said Simcox.

“For the first time now, entire communities … are saying, ‘whites are not allowed,'” he said. “We’re allowing them to create their own communities instead of being a melting pot.”

He added that racial tensions between different minorities and illegal immigrants are escalating, much like the national tensions between Italians, Irish and Polish immigrants about a century ago.

“I don’t think people would be sore about it if they were legal,” he said. “There’s always tensions with a new wave of immigrants,” he added, but he called recent tensions “particularly egregious.”

“[Illegals] have displaced the African Americans who worked hard to get to that level,” he said.

But Simcox was careful to draw a distinction between illegal immigrants of any country and legal ones.

“We have three to four million illegals from China,” he said, and people from 148 other countries were caught by law enforcement officials last year. “And that’s just the ones we caught.”

He said the stereotype of illegal immigrants as wholly or predominantly Hispanic isn’t fair to legal citizens.

He also said that enforcement in border towns is too lax, citing examples of mothers in who have to accompany children to bus stops “to defend themselves against wave of immigrants.”

“That’s not an exaggeration,” he said.

Simcox has spent five years working for the Minutemen and patrolling borders. He says the group works to prevent illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border as well as the U.S. – Canada border.

Ultimately, Simcox would like to see not just an end to illegal immigration, but justice for the legal immigrants.

“We have a subculture of indentured servitude, and that’s immoral.”