President Bush is in Yuma, Arizona today to "relaunch his push for an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws," writes Jonathan Weisman of the Washington Post.

Meanwhile, Time's Massimo Calabresi characterizes Bush's visit this way:

And as with every piece of White House theater, this one has a very specific audience in mind: the anti-immigration right wing of the Republican party.

That's a lazy, loaded sentence if there ever was one. Few Republicans are "anti-immigrant" - and Bush has never tried to appeal to those folks anyway. Many Republicans, however, and quite a few Democrats as well, are opposed to illegal immigration, which is obviously an important distinction.

In related news, the Yuma Sun reports Operation Jump Start has made progress since its launch last July: illicit border activity is down 67% over the last nine months. That seems like a very impressive statistic.

A few hundred miles to the Southeast, however, things look a bit different. I was in the Phoenix area on vacation last week and caught this brief report buried in the Arizona Republic:

Less than 24 hours after beginning patrols along the U.S.-Mexico border near Nogales, members of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps say they encountered as many as 350 undocumented immigrants.

Minuteman President Chris Simcox said Sunday that his group rescued seven immigrants, found the body of another and led border agents to hundreds of migrants in the first day of a monthlong citizen effort to deter illegal immigration.

"It's a free-for-all down here," Simcox said, as his radio cracked with reports that eight immigrants had just been sighted near a water tank. "This place is crawling with (immigrants). . . . It's an amnesty rush."

This is the third year Simcox and volunteers have led their border patrols, which have been criticized by human rights groups as vigilantism. It comes after Border Patrol reports stated that apprehensions of undocumented immigrants are down sharply compared with previous years.

"Whoever's saying that, they haven't been to Altar Valley," he said.